


Put On A Funny Hat And Let's Do This Thing

by toffeecape



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Blasphemy, Coming In Pants, Courtship, Dancing, Deepthroating, Demonic Possession, Demons, Dirty Talk, Domestic Fluff, Drunkenness, Dry Orgasm, Erections, Eventual Smut, Exorcisms, Family Feels, Frottage, Grinding, Hand & Finger Kink, Hand Jobs, Heresy, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Kissing, Kitchen Sex, Light Dom/sub, Lingerie, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Marriage of Convenience, Multiple Orgasms, Mutual Masturbation, Nipple Play, Oral Fixation, Oral Sex, Praise Kink, Psychic Abilities, Rimming, Roman Catholicism, Romantic Comedy, Shower Sex, Touch-Starved, Underwater Sex, Unsafe Sex, Verbal Abuse, Virginity, Wedding Fluff, Wedding Night, lucha libre - Freeform, temporary disability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-15 14:17:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 32,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17530292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toffeecape/pseuds/toffeecape
Summary: NARRATOR: Tomas Ortega has two choices: stop being a priest, or let someone else enter into a green card marriage with Marcus Kea-TOMAS: Everybody get in the truck, I’m marrying Marcus.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author loses control of the narrative immediately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opens sometime after the end of S2.

In typical Bennett fashion, he makes for the most boring exorcism of Marcus’ long and illustrious career.

The demon ignores them completely from the moment they finally run Bennett to ground in northern Montana, loaded for bear. They can't provoke it, nor can they get Bennett to surface. Tomas even tries his white-eyed party trick (no less nauseating for Mouse's assurances that he's become adept at it) _,_ but comes back to himself early with a start.

“They told me to fuck off,” he says, beautiful dark eyes wide with shock and worry. “Both of them.”

Marcus scowls. “It's teaching Bennett to swear? This has gone too far!”

Mouse rolls her eyes. “Bennett knows the word fuck, Marcus.”

Marcus folds his arms. “Even if he does, which is an _extremely_ dubious assumption, he would refuse to say it.”

Tomas frowns. “Is this about that chart Verity emailed you? It doesn't make sense to classify people based on how often they say a single word-”

“Actually it makes a surprising amount of sense, but more to the point it's _funny,_ and jokes are about all we have _left_ at this point-”

“We could, oh I don't know, pray?”

“We pray to strengthen the soul and weaken the demon, and you said yourself they're both ignoring us right now.”

 **Morning** **_Star,_ ** **I'd rather be exorcised than listen to your married bickering,** snarls the demon. **Dismember you later, meatbags.** There is a whoosh of air, and the miasma in the room eases.

“-are hereby _revoked!”_ Bennett shouts, then looks around the room. “Oh. It's gone.”

“Prove it!” Marcus barks, full of confounded Pavlovian adrenaline, and upends his entire jam jar of holy water in Bennett's face. He chokes and splutters, but he doesn't sizzle. Marcus sags in relief.

“I think I got along better with Sozuul,” Bennett coughs at last.

“That was the demon? You were on first-name terms with the damned thing?”

“Will you at least untie me so I can wipe my face?”

A change of clothes and a round of tea later (prepared _properly,_ Marcus makes sure, since his skills as an exorcist aren't needed) it comes out that Bennett had run across what sounds like the demon version of - Bennett.

“It was deeply insulted to answer a Vocare Pulvere summoning and find only me in a coma instead of a lineup of willing sycophants. The ritual requires consent to work.”

“Then why let it stay for any time at all?” asks Tomas.

“It didn't want to waste the trip, and offered to trade information.”

“What kind of information?” Mouse asks carefully.

Bennett gives her a withering glare. Marcus swears he gets a new wrinkle every time Bennett aims that look at him. “What do you take me for? I taught it how to use the Internet. Sozuul is now Hell's leading authority on ICQ, MySpace, and-” he smirks, “America Online.”

Tomas whistles quietly. Mouse snickers.

“What?” says Marcus, who is still quite excited about email.

“Those are all dead Internet things,” Tomas explains. “Bennett might as well have taught the demon to - I don't know, drive a horse and buggy instead of a car.”

Bennett takes a serene sip of tea. “Confusion to the enemy.”

“That's all well and good, but it could have fed you garbage in like kind,” Marcus points out.

“But unlike a demon, I _can_ perform a competent search and verify the information. Lend me one of your laptops, if you please.”

Marcus, Tomas, and Mouse blink at each other. “Bennett,” Marcus says slowly, “you don't pay me enough to own three pairs of socks. None of us own a laptop.”

It comes out that Bennett hasn't paid attention to the cost of living in almost twenty years. Marcus hasn't the foggiest idea what he thought he was doing with the money (“Frankly, Marcus, I thought you were doing cocaine.” “That was _one time,_ they were coca _leaves,_ and it was a local custom!”), but he finds his grievances greatly soothed by the joyous prospect of watching Bennett have to use a small-town library computer.

Bennett does not disappoint. He turns a greenish hue visible even underneath his exquisitely-moisturised (or whatever it is he does to still look so smooth and shiny while Marcus is the same age and emphatically neither) black complexion, and says, “Oh dear. This is _very_ slow.”

Then he produces a yellow legal pad from somewhere, and a fountain pen, and starts to make notes. Occasionally he says things like, “Oh, my,” or, “Hm. Disappointing,” and then he resorts to just cursing very quietly in French, and Marcus is unable to feel amused anymore. He paces around the little library, feeling like a caged animal. Tomas puts a hand on his arm at one point, a silent question on his face. Marcus shrugs helplessly, and Tomas lets him go back to wearing a track in the floor.

By the time Bennett puts down his pen and pinches the bridge of his nose, Marcus is about ready to jump out of his skin. “Well? Just how comprehensively fucked are we?”

“Language. It seems about half of this new intel is bad, and the half that’s good is still bad news. I will refer to my other contacts to deal with most of it, but there is one piece that concerns you, Marcus.” He taps his notes. “Your religious visa's been revoked. You're in America illegally.”

At Marcus’ side, Tomas goes rigid and takes a sharp breath. Marcus frowns, confused. “Wasn't I always? I thought you did that back when you processed my excommunication.” That was why (before being shoved back into Tomas’ orbit, ears still ringing from God's version of a motivational speech) he'd worked the docks in a port for cash; a literal space alien could have done the same, green skin and antennae and all, and would probably have been invited out for drinks by the end of the first week.

“I was required to present it to you, and I was carefully watched for any hesitation.” His voice is dry as ashes. “But I wasn't the one who processed it, and if I noticed that no one remembered to do the paperwork to revoke your visa, well. Who am I to tell someone how to do their job?” He gives Marcus a brief, oily smile, survivor of the Vatican's pit of eels; it's no wonder he ran circles around a single demon in his own head. “But it seems that detail is no longer overlooked. If your whereabouts become known, Vatican agents will enlist immigration to have you deported.”

“Shame,” Marcus reflects, “I quite like it here. Very big. Interesting music.” He can't look at Tomas, but he can feel his gaze burning a hole in his head.

“Marcus,” Bennett says patiently, “you’re on the watchlist of every demonic faction organized enough to have a watchlist. My people had to kill several integrated assassins every time you flew _before_ Chicago. After it, I kept you stateside because I didn't know if my resources were enough to keep you safe. Now, I doubt you would even make it off the plane.”

Marcus digests this information for a moment, feeling a bit like a fish reminded of the existence of water. “Can't you just whip me up a fake identity?”

Bennett looks at him, then at the clunky little computer in front of him, then at his scribbled-upon legal pad, then back at Marcus. “No.”

Marcus sighs heavily and thumps into a battered library chair. He doesn't even try to hook a leg over the armrest. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

“Loath as I am to suggest inflicting this fate on anyone, it would be expedient if you could find someone to marry you.”

Marcus nearly falls out of his chair, for all that he's sitting in it properly for once. “Say again?”

“You heard me.”

Now it's Tomas’ turn to sigh heavily. Bennett is infecting them all. “You know, I wasn't always good at it, and I haven't actually done it for almost two years, but I really did like being a priest.”

Marcus grips his armrests wearily, feeling that he may be flung off the earth into space at any moment. “What are you on about.”

Tomas blinks his giant green eyes, innocent as a baby deer. “Isn't it obvious? I'll have to get laicized before I can marry you.”

 _“What?_ Why would you jump to the conclusion that it has to be you?”

“I don't understand the question.”

“You could let someone else do it.”

Blink. Maybe less like a baby deer than some obstinate mountain stag. “Um, no.”

* * *

They boil out of the small-town library, voices rising rapidly past the threshold that earned them the ire of the small-town librarian (Mother Bernadette would have been impressed by the frostiness of her glare).

“You don't have to do this, Tomas. I have friends-”

“Mostly nuns,” Mouse points out.

“Some of them are ex-nuns!”

 _“Lesbian_ ex-nuns.”

“Well, what about you?”

 _“I'm_ British, which does exactly nothing to solve your problem. Also I wouldn't marry you in a million years, luv.”

“Oi!” Marcus clutches theatrically at his chest. She smirks at him. Christ, she's a dear friend. Marcus wouldn't shackle her to himself in a million years either. Which is part of the point. He turns to his _dearest_ friend and says, “Tomas. Be reasonable. You can't marry me.”

As soon as he says the ‘c’ word he knows it's a mistake. Tomas’ unreasonable shoulders bulge in his sleeves, and he thrusts out his chin. This is the picture next to the word 'mulish’ in the dictionary. “And why not?” he says.

“First of all, you said it yourself: you're a priest. You like it. You're good at it.”

“I _liked_ it. I _was_ good at it - parts of it. Now I'm an exorcist.” Marcus notes with dismay that he doesn't say he likes being one. _I am no one's bloody role model._ “I was never going to go back to being a priest. I'm not really giving up anything.” Except the possibility of an exit strategy, one of Marcus’ fondest daydreams: Tomas safe and at peace, the beating heart of a community that adores him.

“You’re not to give it up at all,” he rages. “I'm not entering into a sham marriage with anyone!” _Least of all you. I couldn't bear it._

“That's exactly why it should be me,” Tomas says, “it wouldn't be a sham.”

Marcus boggles. “You're straight!”

“Says who?”

“Says Jessica!”

Mouse and Bennett are just staring at them both, heads going back and forth like spectators at a tennis match. At the mention of Jessica Bennett's eyes go round, and Mouse covers her mouth with her hand.

Tomas is red-faced but undeterred. _“La bisexualidad,_ Marcus, it’s a thing.” He hesitates. “Wait, are _you_ straight?”

Marcus fidgets. “Don't think so. Don't rightly know much more than that, though,” he mutters. Now it's his turn to be beet-red, nevermind that he has the best possible excuse for being a virgin in his fifties.

“We can figure that part out,” Tomas urges, “it won’t be a problem. Marcus,” he widens his eyes pleadingly, “we already share everything: life, work, a common calling from God. This will just - make us stronger.”

Marcus crosses his arms and glares at the ground. “I'm not convinced.”

It’s another misstep, and Tomas pounces on it. “But you _could_ be convinced. Let me convince you.”

“What, are you going to _court_ me?” He meant to sneer it, but to his horror he falters and it comes out more - wobbly.

Tomas beams. “Well, I am _now.”_ Marcus has read that a sensation of impending doom can be a symptom of a heart attack.

“This is the greatest day of my life,” Mouse says fervently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. I’m fudging the canon and making Bennett the same age as Marcus. Also he wasn’t integrated and didn’t decapitate anyone with a giant pair of novelty scissors. 
>   2. Tomas speaks Spanish, but I do not. If Google Translate and slang guides have led me astray, please do speak up!
>   3. That's not how green cards work, but hey, it's a canon-adjacent TE romcom. Moving on!
> 



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tomas puts his money where his mouth is.

Tomas’ first courting gift to Marcus is more in the way of an extraction. Or an extrication.

When he gets a moment alone he calls the local bishop's office, makes an appointment, checks in with Mouse, and sets a vibrate alarm on his burner phone. The next day he slips out while Marcus is still asleep in the other bed, taking the keys with him.

Waiting in the parking lot, however, he finds not Mouse but Bennett. He's leaning against a wiped-clean patch on the body of the truck, nursing some kind of espresso drink he managed to find before dawn in a tiny prairie town. Tomas has been inside his mind and is still not ready to rule out the possibility of him being a robot.

“You're not going to try and stop me, are you? This was your idea.”

He hands Tomas a coffee of his own. “Get in. It's a large diocese and a long drive to the bishop's office.”

When the town has fallen out of sight in the rearview mirror, Bennett says, “My suggestion that _someone_ marry Marcus was only the first of several ideas, but you jumped on it so quickly I thought it pointless to continue.”

It's true. The moment of decision never existed at all; Tomas knew what he was going to do the same instant the idea was spoken aloud.

Some time later, Bennett says, “Do you know, Marcus and I are from the same cohort?”

“I know.” Marcus had told him once, about how the more promising of the Church's ‘recruited’ youths had been herded together from around the world to prepare for seminary. How the wildest and prissiest two of the bunch had become frenemies.

“Then you understand that I have some experience with stubborn individuals.”  

“Then why are you here?”

“To remind you that you don't owe His Excellency the bishop every detail. Every Catholic with a gram of compassion carries a quiet armful of heresies, and works for reform.” Bennett sips his coffee with lidded eyes, as placid as a statue of a saint. “I won't presume to tell you what to do. Just consider that you are not obligated to dash yourself against every stone you see. You are allowed to flow around them.”

Bennett only met Tomas after fear for the Rance family had lit a fire under him. He used to be very, very good at flowing around stones. He navigates his meeting with the bishop with that old slick ease, explaining that he wishes to marry “someone I have known for almost two years, who has become very close to me. I feel that God has led me to this new path.”

“Ah well, sorry to see you go, my lad, but as the Apostle said: better to marry than to burn, eh?” They proceed with removal of the clerical state and dispensation from the obligation of celibacy so briskly Tomas’ head spins. He's almost home free when the bishop winks and says, “So, who’s the lucky lady?”

Tomas opens his mouth to lie, and suddenly his quiet armful of heresies feels very heavy indeed.

* * *

When Marcus wakes, Tomas is gone, and so are the keys to the truck. His first thought is, _he thought better of this nonsense, and fled with Mouse. Good._ But all his things are still on his bedside table, and Mouse is still in her motel room. She confirms that instead, Tomas has gone to get a running start on ruining his life.

“Bennett asked to drive him. He wants to tell him not to go hard.”

“Bloody hell, Mouse, that's guaranteed to _make_ him go hard!”

Sure enough, Tomas comes back in the afternoon, without his collar and with a black envelope, and also with a wrenchingly familiar shattered expression. Marcus’ opening salvo in another shouting match dries up in his mouth.  

Bennett disembarks, looks at Marcus, and shrugs. “It seems I'm the only one who still believes in change from within,” he sniffs. Marcus knows he’s not trying to come across as disdainful, but it's still hard not to punch him.

“Bennett?” Mouse says sweetly, “Bugger off.” She hesitates and gives Tomas an awkward pat on the shoulder before buggering off herself.

Tomas sits on the tailgate of the truck for a long time, looking out at the prairie.

Eventually Marcus goes out and sits beside him, close but not touching. Tomas closes the gap and leans against him.

“I'm not worth this.”

Tomas knocks his head gently against Marcus’. “You are, and I will keep saying it until you believe me. But you know, when the sticking point came, it wasn't you I thought of? It was Verity. Maybe I'm tired of tacitly upholding the lie that there's something wrong with the way God made her. And you.” He pauses. “And me.”

“You meant what you said the other day, then. About being-” he can't actually say it.

“Bi? Yes. In theory, anyway - I don't have a lot of practice. _You_ know how it is.”

“I do.” A lifetime of looking away, of forcing your thoughts to other things because it doesn't matter, you swore off _all_ of it, isn't easily undone. He has a handful of times looking back, now, and even a few kisses (and he turns these memories over and over in his mind, like the wondrous little treasures they are), but they are far from a habit.

They stare out at the plains, sun on yellowing grass, perfectly flat all the way to the horizon. It's like a golden, windless sea, swallowed up by the biggest possible sky.

“Still smarts though, doesn't it. Being cast out.”

“Mm. I see why you got drunk.”

“Want to do that now?”

 _“Dios,_ yes. I really do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Tomas is not allowed to drive because he has untreated supernatural epilepsy. 
>   2. I'm sure that's not how getting laicized by a bishop works, but it IS how excommunication is handled on the show. Moving on!
> 



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What do you do when your best mate went to get defrocked for you and got himself excommunicated instead? Take him out to get sloshed, of course.

“Bless me, Father,” Tomas slurs, “for I have sinned.”  

Marcus raises his beer stein in benediction. “What are your sins, my child?”

“I have committed the sin of lying.”

“What did you lie about?”

“I said every baby I ever baptized was beautiful, and I was _lying.”_

Marcus slams the stein down and props his forehead on its rim, sniggering. From the corner of his eye, he can see Tomas grinning at him.

“Most of them looked like little space aliens. Especially when they started crying and turned red.”

Marcus breaks into high-pitched giggles. Tomas giggles too as he says, “Except for this one baby, she looked like a tiny, uh, Winston Churchill. You know, with the-” Tomas puffs out his cheeks and drags them down with his fingers.

“Jowls?”

Tomas slaps the table and points at him. “Jowls! That's the word!”

Marcus leans back in his chair with his arms limp at his sides, still giggling, starting to shake as tears stream from his eyes.

“Some of the older ones who came in were cuter, but they would try to rip my nose off, or bite me.”

Marcus breaks into full-throated laughter, and Tomas stares at him for a long moment then follows suit.

When they finally recover, Marcus asks, “Do you want to kill another pitcher, or go home?”

Tomas’ brow knits. “I'm about two beers away from telling this whole bar I'm courting a man, and headbutting the first person who looks at me funny for it.”

“I'm drunk enough to help you.”

“Pfft. You'd help me stone cold sober.” Marcus acknowledges this truth with a tip of his stein. Tomas nods his head like he's come to a decision. “Right. _Vamanos.”_

They weave their way back to the motel, arms around each other's waists, Tomas warbling some Mexican pop hit and trying to get Marcus to sing along.

When the last notes die away, Marcus says, “So we're still calling it courting, then?” The word makes something flutter in his stomach, some ancient boyhood fantasy revived. Or maybe that's just the alcohol catching up with him.

“Only because what I _really_ want to call it would embarrass you.”

“And what's that?”

“Wooing. M'gonna woo you so hard, Marcus.”

Marcus focuses on his feet, blushing violently.

“That's what I'm talking about, _güero_ _._ I wouldn't make you blush like that in front of other people.”

It doesn't mean anything, Marcus tells himself. Tomas is always affectionate when he's drunk, handsy and full of Spanish pet names.

But then Tomas tightens his arm around Marcus’ waist in a new way, lowers his voice, and says, “Because it's too cute. I'd have to fight off rival suitors all the time.”

This startles a laugh out of Marcus. “Oh yes, they're lining up out the door to get a piece of this! For Christ's sake, Tomas, I'm old enough to be your father.”

“Age ain’t nothin’ but a number,” Tomas sings, loudly and off-key, then says, “but seriously, it's not a problem. I did the math.”

“The _math?”_

“There’s a whole formula, for if an age gap is creepy or not. Olivia told me about it.”

Marcus is grinning despite himself. “Oh, a _formula._ Do tell.”

“So, it's your age, divided by - hang on, I've got this - divided by two, plus seven. That's the youngest person you can be with without it being creepy. You're 54-”

“How do you know that?”

“Harper made you tell her your birthday, remember? June 10, 1964.”

The flutter is back again. “You remembered.”

 _“Por supuesto._ So anyway, um, 27 plus 7 is 34, and I'm 35-”

 _August 28, 1983,_ Marcus confirms silently to himself, and notes with relief that they have arrived at the motel.

“-so there's a whole year to spare!” Tomas says triumphantly.

Marcus starts giggling again as he struggles with the key to their room. Tomas is leaning heavily on him - and with his muscles he is _heavy,_ for all that Marcus has a couple of inches on him. “I defer to the authority of Olivia.”

“Wise man,” Tomas says seriously. “My sister is _terrifying.”_

The door opens abruptly despite Marcus not having got the key in yet. Bennett is behind it, resplendent in a goopy face mask. “If you do not go back to your room instead of trying to enter mine, I will _show_ you terrifying.” He smells like cucumbers and clay.

“Sorry,” Marcus wheezes, far too drunk to cope with this, “sorry, Bennett.” They move one door down and let themselves in (the lock much more forthcoming now that it's the correct one) before collapsing to the floor, crying with stifled laughter.

 _“Madre de Dios,”_ Tomas hisses like he's in pain, “he looked like a swamp monster from a low-budget movie!”

“Ow, ow, stop,” Marcus hoots, clutching his sides. “Ah, God, I always wondered how he stayed so good-looking while I'm all over crow’s feet.”

Tomas stills, and looks at him with so much fondness Marcus’ throat tightens. “I love the lines on your face. They show the world who you are.”

“And who's that?”

Tomas rolls to face him directly, reaches out and rubs his thumb over the crease between Marcus’ eyebrows. “Someone who has suffered much, and is kind anyway,” he says, still with a slight smile, but his eyes are serious.

He leans over, and for a heart-pounding moment Marcus thinks he's going to kiss him. But he only touches their foreheads together, as they have done so many times before, and rolls his head back and forth, a fond nuzzle. “Marcus,” he says, “Marcus.” On the third pass he overbalances and falls onto Marcus’ chest.

“Oof!”

Tomas sighs gustily. “Marcus, I am so very drunk.”

“Clearly. Let's pour some water into you, and then pour you into bed.”

A drooping Tomas cooperates with this plan, more or less, right up until Marcus is pulling a blanket over him. He makes one uncoordinated but surprisingly strong grab and drags Marcus down beside him.

“Tomas?”

“I haven't been this drunk in over ten years, but I still remember how cold I get when I start to sober up. Stay with me?”

“‘Course,” Marcus answers, and Tomas snuggles up, flops an arm over him, and drops off into sodden sleep. “Always,” he adds quietly.

He is so fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Yeah, I just used the actors’ actual ages and birthdays. I’m classy like that.
>   2. Tomas and ugly babies is the brainchild of [Arae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arae/pseuds/Arae); frankly the entire TE Discord should be listed as a co-author on this thing. [Come on over](https://discord.gg/twkzTdU) if you want to be part of the fun! 
> 



	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Demons don't care about your hangover or your courtship plans, Tomas.

“Why are we even still here?” Bennett demands the next day. Marcus and Tomas both flinch.

“Quieter, please,” Tomas begs in a cracked whisper, cradling a coffee mug in shaking hands within the blanket he has stayed cocooned in at the breakfast table. Beside him, Marcus shovels scrambled eggs into his mouth with the grim determination Tomas recognizes from innumerable mid-exorcism rest breaks.

When he's cleared about half his plate, Marcus looks up from the table to Bennett. “We're looking for where to go next. Without leads from you, we're down to gleaning clues from local news, or waiting on divine revelation.”

“Both of which are more spotty than not,” says Mouse from the bed, where she sits cross-legged, cleaning her guns. It's Tomas’ bed; he let her use it the first time, and now she won't do it anywhere else and Tomas always smells faintly of gun oil. He likes it - the sign of her brusque protection. He's glad she kept doing it that way after Marcus came back.

“Spotty,” Bennett repeats. “Direct communication from the Almighty.”

“Not direct,” Tomas is compelled to say, “more cryptic.” He remembers when Marcus first returned, weeks after God spoke _to_ him instead of _through_ him, and still barely able to talk about it without trembling. _The blindness only lasted an hour or so, and my hearing was more or less back to normal by the next day. I belong here, that’s the main thing,_ he’d said. Maybe cryptic isn’t so bad after all.

“Could just as easily be demons flapping their arsecheeks at you,” Marcus points out for the _n_ th time, “imps of the perverse that they are. _But,”_ he adds with a conciliatory lift of his hands before Tomas can open his mouth to argue, “even if that's the case, it still gives away their locations so we can evict the blighters.” They've had this talk, too: _I still don't like it, and I can't stop you from doing it - but I can make sure you’re not alone with it._

(Tomas will haul Marcus to a marriage commissioner in a fireman's carry before he lets him get deported. It may well still happen that way.)

Bennett makes a moue like he likes it even less than Marcus. “I see. Rebuilding my referrals network just moved up a rung on my to-do list.”

“Good,” say the other three at once.

In the absence of referrals or revelation, Tomas goes out looking for newspapers. He finds some outside a well-appointed general store, and wanders inside. They turn out to have a small clothing section, and Tomas impulsively grabs a few things. Marcus’ entire wardrobe makes up the saddest little fraction of their single washer load when they visit a laundromat; Tomas warms to the idea of providing better. A pack of socks, a pack of those sleeveless undershirts Marcus favors (and looks so good in, especially the black ones - he can admit that now).

He's dithering happily over underwear color when revelation strikes.

It’s amazing what you can get used to, with practice. He’s able, now, to keep his bearings in a vision, to try to note those details that will help guide them to _where,_ when _why_ is what tries to grab the attention with its bigger emotional punch. And he can recognize what is happening to him, and brace for his return to normal consciousness.

“...Sir? Sir, are you okay? Do I need to call 911?” The voice starts out sounding far away, but grows rapidly closer until Tomas feels the familiar jolt, like being dropped from a height and landing on his feet, and opens his eyes to see the speaker.

It’s the clerk, a teenaged girl, looking at him uncertainly with her phone out like she’s about to dial. Her nametag says _June._

“I’m okay,” he manages to say, trying to shake off the reflexive horror, or at least hide it. He navigates better in-vision than post-vision. “There’s no need to call anyone.”

“What was that? Some kind of seizure?”

Tomas doesn’t need to fake his embarrassment, and uses it to bolster his lie. “Yes, that’s right. It happens sometimes.”

June eyes him sidelong. “Pretty sure there's pills you can take for that.”

“They don't work on me, and it's never worse than what you saw.” Another lie. Sometimes he’s under for a long time and comes to in a different place with Mouse watching him carefully or Marcus hovering over him; other times the visions overwhelm him with their malevolence and he surfaces with an urgent need to vomit.

This one wasn’t too bad: just a bleak, lonely, sullen man; the demon intensifying all those things in him to the brink of ruin; a woman well-clear of him but worried for him all the same (and enough details about her new home that Tomas knows she is how they will find him).  

“That would've been plenty bad enough if you were driving.” June sounds suddenly scratchy, and Tomas thinks about the white crosses that pop up beside the highway in the most desolate stretches of nowhere, festooned with faded flowers.

“I travel with friends,” he says gently, “they don't let me drive.” And he thinks he just finished sulking like a child about that.

“Okay. Good. Uh, do you need help getting back to them?”

Tomas lifts his basket and smiles. “Just by ringing these up.” He grabs a pack of medium boxer-briefs and heads to the checkout, trying to hold on to the anticipation he was feeling earlier. There's anticipation when there's a demon to hunt down, too, but it's a cold and urgent sensation, a pit in the stomach. Nothing like the warm feeling of acquiring gifts for someone - for his _intended._

Oh. There's the warmth back.

* * *

Marcus is sketching some plants he picked outside the motel, to look up in a botany book later, when Tomas comes in.

“Welcome back. What's the news?”

Tomas tosses three slim newspapers on the table. “The news is, I got you something.” He hands Marcus a shopping bag, and watches eagerly, rocking on his heels, as Marcus opens it up.

“...Socks, singlets, and pants. How romantic.” He’s pleased, actually; they’re all the style he already has, and not so much he can't find room for them in his bag.

“You won't buy them for yourself, so.” Tomas grins and looks down as he scrubs at the back of his neck, as if he enjoys giving Marcus gifts more than he wants to let on.

Marcus’ eyes narrow. Tomas has been _wallowing_ in his enjoyment of this whole absurd business from the outset. He's looking down to hide his face. “Tomas? Did something else happen?”

The furtive glance up, the nervous swallow - Marcus knows Tomas has to have at least _some_ ability to dissemble or he could never have cut it as a priest, but with him he's always been the most hopelessly earnest person Marcus has ever met. “A vision,” he says, “a new one.”  

“Where?”

“South. I recognized the hills we passed when we were chasing Bennett north.” Tomas looks ill, and Marcus knows he saw a hell of a lot more than hills. This is why he thinks the visions come from demons: in his experience, God is more one for terror than horror.

Marcus sighs and rubs his face. “Well, that’s enough to get started. Pity.”

“What’s a pity?”

“I was going to suggest Bennett take a day trip north across the border; I thought he might find it spiritually enriching to visit a place with the most functional name in the world. You know _exactly_ what happened there.”

“What’s the name?”

“Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.”

Tomas’ face brightens again as he laughs; Marcus watches him with an enjoyment akin to how Tomas watched him open his gifts just now. At length, Tomas points out, “You know, if you had a green card we could all go.”

Marcus snorts. “Come on, let's go rally the troops.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Yes it’s a real place, and it was super impressive; imagine operating a slaughterhouse with no walls, no guns, not even horses. Now it’s a rad Blackfoot history museum, totally worth a trip if you’re ever in the area. 
>   2. Actually Marcus could cross into Canada with a British passport, but, uh, let’s just say he and Tomas don’t know that. Moving on! 
> 



	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> God Squad go!

The demon in Virgil King takes one look at them and laughs so hard it vomits by accident.

 **Really?** **_Really?_ ** **Wh-where do I fucking start?** It cackles and whoops as Marcus and Tomas wrestle it into restraints, praying in unison with Mouse. **Two ex-priests and an ex-nun really think they're going to budge** **_me?_ **

“No,” says Marcus, “God is. _For it is the Most High God who commands you, He to whom you heretofore in your great pride considered yourself equal…”_

(Bennett is elsewhere in the house, ‘keeping watch’: surrounded by notebooks, typing a mile a minute on a laptop he acquired somehow - possibly when they traded their terrible pistachio-green truck for a horrible spinach-green van - and arguing with several people on speakerphone in Swiss German. His office is sprouting anew around him, like a shoot from an onion bulb.)

The demon really does seem spoiled for choice, jumping from target to target in an erratic quest for low-hanging fruit. It calls Mouse a demon slut and Tomas an adulterous slut and Marcus a virgin slut, which is surprising enough to startle a laugh out of Marcus.

“Nice to be included, I guess?”

This triggers a predictable rant about casual sex in chimpanzees and how all humans are filthy meatbag slutmonkeys (demons love the doctrine of original sin so much Marcus suspects they seeded it in the Bible themselves). Marcus is less than half-listening as they pray.

Here's the thing: Marcus has spent almost 80% of his life to date performing exorcisms. It's entirely possible that, all told, he’s logged more waking hours in the company of demons than humans (he tried to work out the numbers on a napkin once, and stopped before he got to the answer because it was too depressing). He's wearily familiar with the hamfisted way they rummage through people's minds; there's hardly a bad feeling in his life he hasn't had dragged out of him and dealt with. He imagines it's a tiny bit like therapy - if the therapist hated you, smelled like rotten milk and cat piss, and kept trying to bite off your face.

So when the demon lolls Virgil’s head toward Marcus, narrows Virgil’s eyes, and says, **That's new,** Marcus is honestly a little curious what it might unpack for him.

**Naturally I commend you stringing the boy along, given how you destroyed your parents’ marriage just by being born.**

“Bo-ring,” Marcus says, and flicks it with holy water.

**Notice the timing? How the offer only came up after you were threatened with removal from the gameboard? Even that much was a surprise; surely you're just a pawn to be sacrificed.**

Flick. _“Therefore, accursed dragon and every diabolical legion, we adjure you by the living God, by the true God, by the holy God-”_

**How can you even be considering it? You know your role is to be used up and then discarded, not to use others.**

_“By the God who so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life-”_

**You're too old to learn to touch someone! You don't even know how to properly want it!**

Marcus pauses briefly, stung, then shrugs. _“Cease your deception of the human race and your giving them to drink of the poison of everlasting damnation-”_

**You're so desperate not to be alone you'll let this man trap himself with you in an empty lie!**

Marcus stops. That more than stings. He makes a mental note to think it through when this is over, then shakes himself and opens his mouth to keep going.

Unfortunately he reckoned without Tomas, who is not so inured to demonic abuse, and who snaps, “That's _enough,”_ slaps a palm on Virgil's forehead, and rolls his eyes up. The demon makes a noise like it's been gut-punched.

“Tomas, no!”

“Has that _ever_ worked for you?” asks Mouse.

“I live in hope,” Marcus says glumly.

* * *

Mouse once called Tomas an atom bomb and accused Marcus of trying to use him like a surgeon's scalpel, as if this implied fussiness and hesitancy. But Tomas remembers the time he had a chance to watch an orthopedic surgery; he remembers the way the surgeon raced the clock to minimize the exposure of tissue to the open air, flinging bone chips and gobbets of flesh in all directions. Tomas aspires to be a surgeon's scalpel _in the hands of a surgeon_ (the surgeon, hopefully, being God).

Virgil King is not a nice man. He was so indifferent to his wife, Esther, that he didn't visit her once during her last three hospitalizations. When she decided she was too ill to survive another winter on the farm and moved into town, she didn't bother asking if he wanted to come with her.

“I thought he'd keep right on ignoring me while I packed up my things,” she'd told Tomas when he and Marcus sought her out, “but instead there was an ugly scene. It was like I suddenly didn't know him at all. I drove away fast and I ain't talked to him since, but some of our friends say he’s still acting strange. Real strange. Everybody out here's got old dead cars on their property, but his are all twisted up now like some kinda art piece - and nobody ever seen him doing the twisting.”

When they drove out to the farm, the twisted-up cars were in the shape of a gigantic, headless woman. Virgil sullenly ignored Tomas and Marcus, but the demon came boiling forth as soon as Mouse spoke.

 **Poor Virgil,** it'd croaked, **he'd've bet money on the heifer trudging along, playing the loyal farmwife until the end. Thought he’d find her frozen solid one day, face-down between the well and the house. Or the house and the privy. Now he's supposed to fetch his own water, do his own cooking and cleaning, while she's still** **_alive_ ** **out there somewhere. Unbelievable!**

Virgil had instead taken to fetching his own beer, doing his own microwaving, and not cleaning anything at all - himself included. The demon first came to him in the form of his wife the way she looked when they got married, when they were both barely more than children. Some of this Esther told them, some of it the demon told them, and some of it comes to Tomas unbidden as he advances into Virgil's mindscape.

He's not a nice man, but he doesn't deserve to be possessed - nobody does. He probably won't turn his life around, but like every beloved child of God he has the right to that chance. And he lasted this long without integrating, so there's something in him fighting back. Tomas reminds himself of these facts as he struggles through the snow toward the lights he hopes are the windows of the farmhouse. It's a late summer day in the real world, but in Virgil's mind the sky is black with clouds fuelling a whiteout blizzard.

Dimly, he can hear Mouse and Marcus praying for him.

He finds the farmhouse by walking face-first into it, and he finds the door by feel - just in time, as his hands are starting to go numb by the time he gets inside. The heat hits him like a blast from a furnace. The smell of the air isn't half as bad as the stench in reality, which is to say it's still very terrible.

 **Go away,** hisses the demon, a skeleton shrink-wrapped in tattered skin, hair drifting around its face like rotten cornsilk. **You're not welcome here.** Behind it, across the room, a door opens silently, and someone waves at him through the gap: Virgil.

The demon opens its lipless mouth impossibly wide and launches itself at Tomas, who ducks and rolls under it, scrambling for the door. Virgil slams it shut behind him. Tomas almost sits on the bed, then remembers how filthy the real one is and sags against the wall instead.

“Do I need to explain to you that that thing is not your wife?”

“No, I guessed as much when it started making me hork up centipedes.” Virgil is a little, grey, potbellied man, hunched in the corner. The frown-lines on his face are black grooves of grime in the dimness, deepening as he swallows down his gorge.

“Do you know who I am? Were you aware when my partners and I introduced ourselves?”

“Some kinda priest, right?”

“Close enough. My name is Tomas. I am an exorcist.”

“An exorcist,” Virgil says flatly. “That would make that thing a-”

“A demon, yes.”

“Don’t listen to him, honey! It’s just me, your own dear Esther, and all I ever wanted was for you to be my own back.” The demon is using a young woman’s voice outside the door.

“Shut up, you’re not her!” Virgil yells.

“That’s right,” Tomas says, “it’s just an unclean spirit, and with God’s help we can cast it out.”

“God,” Virgil spits. “I’m supposed to believe in God now?”

Tomas sighs internally. “You don’t have to, no. You only have to believe that that thing doesn’t belong here.”

 _“That_ I can get behind. But-” he hesitates, and his voice gets smaller, “if it goes, then she’ll really be gone.”

“No, she won’t. The real Esther is still out there, and she’s worried about you. She helped us find you, Virgil.”

“But she won’t be _mine!”_ Virgil snaps, on the verge of tears.

The demon laughs. **Like you ever did anything but take her for granted.**

“She was never yours,” Tomas argues, because he never did learn to leave well enough alone, and because he's beginning to suspect this was the demon's point of entry. “That's not how marriage works.”

 **How would** **_you_ ** **know? Broken home, career celibate,** **_adulterer._ ** **Even now you're just trying to use it to bind your mentor, trap him in your vortex of disaster.**

“This isn't about me,” Tomas snaps before he can stop himself.

Virgil is staring at him. “‘Close enough’ to a priest, indeed.”

“Look, do you want to get free?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Is there anything you want to - say?”

Virgil smirks at him. “You were about to say ‘pray’, weren’t you?”

Tomas digs deep for patience. “Can you think of something you can say and mean, that the demon would not want you to say?”

Virgil looks down. “Esther - the real Esther - the last thing she packed before she left was a new little poster, one I’d never seen before. About cracked my brain in half. I think that’s when everything went sideways, actually. It said, um,

 _We each belong to ourselves_  
_I belong to myself_  
_My body, my time, my feelings_  
_My personal space_  
_My thoughts, my spirit, all of me_ _  
All other people belong to themselves.”_

The demon grunts, and then begs in the young Esther’s voice, “No, no, I’m yours, I belong to you, and **you belong to me.** _That’s_ where you went wrong. Forget that wicked hippy-dippy filth.”

Tomas’ smile is all teeth. “That’ll work.” He pulls out his rosary. _“_ _Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu nombre…”_

Virgil rolls his eyes and mutters, “That’s cheating,” but then joins in with, “We each belong to ourselves, I belong to myself…” which he is able to chant with increasing conviction as the demon growls and squawks like a furious cat.

The crack under the door begins to glow with light, and the demon makes a horrible, grinding screech. Tomas finishes his current prayer and lays a hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “When you’re ready, open the door.”

Virgil shouts, “All other people belong to themselves, _and you don’t belong here! Get out!”_ and yanks open the door. Light floods in, and-

-Tomas opens his eyes to Marcus’ face, inches from his own, frantic worry collapsing into relief.

The demon is still just barely clinging to Virgil, its breath coming in bubbling gasps. **He’ll have lost everything once I’m gone,** it rasps. **He’ll just… wait.**

“Then he’ll wait in peace,” Marcus tells it, and lays his hand over Tomas’, still resting on Virgil’s forehead. Mouse stands back, unable to join in this part sincerely but guarding them as they pray, _“Son of the morning, banished from grace. Profane thing, ashes on the earth. You are relieved, outcast. Fallen angel, you are loved.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Special thanks again to [Arae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arae/pseuds/Arae) for workshopping the demon's dialogue with me!
>   2. Virgil King is a cameo from something else. I'm dating myself here, but so will you if you recognize it: "See the old guy in the hat? That's Virgil King. He used to work his daddy's farm. Forty years of sweat an' shit. The recession hit. Kids left, he started drinking, his wife left, lost the whole deal. Found God, lost God, kept drinking. Now he just... waits."
> 



	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *looks at cast* Mouse is the only one of you who seems to remember this is a romcom.

Virgil barely comes back to himself before going into shock, and he leaves by ambulance. Tomas feels pretty shaky himself, and is not ashamed to rest his weight on Marcus as they make their way through the refuse both inside and outside the house to get back to the van.

“I’m not sure that even counts as a hoarding situation,” says Bennett as they drive away. “That’s just a cesspit. Do you think it would help to pay a junk removal service to meet him upon discharge?”

Marcus shakes his head. “Old farmer like him wouldn’t appreciate it, strangers all over his things. Right?” Tomas nods confirmation. “He’ll get to it himself once he needs the money from the bottles and cans.”

“If I had to come home to that, I'd go the arson route for sure,” Mouse reflects. Tomas wonders how she ever thought she wanted to be a nun.

They stop by Esther's lodge and tell her how it went. She cries and then tries to get them to stay for supper as if they all four don't look and smell like they just climbed out of a landfill. Tomas begs off; on top of everything else he was sweating buckets the whole time he was in his trance, and he may just crawl right out of his skin if he can't shower soon. She sends them off with two saran-wrapped loaves of banana bread.

They find a cheap motel, pay for two doubles, and agree to meet back at the truck in an hour to go find supper. Tomas leaves a trail of inside-out clothes from the front door to the bathroom, and completely uses up one of the two bars of soap scrubbing himself off.

Shower time is usually also the time to discreetly touch himself, an opportunity he has needed even more frequently since undertaking to woo Marcus, but tonight he is 1. acutely aware of how Marcus is on the other side of the door, equally filthy and suffering as he waits for his turn to get clean; and 2. troubled by some of the things the demon said. So he rinses a final time and comes out in his towel, still wet. Marcus is already down to his underwear when Tomas emerges, and disappears into the bathroom with similar haste, but not before his eyes rake over Tomas’ wet body in a way that leaves his skin tingling long after he finishes drying off and dressing.

He picks up their clothes and shoves them into the laundry bag, wraps the laundry bag in one of the spare garbage bags stored in the bottom of the bin, then stows the whole thing under their duffles so housekeeping doesn't throw it out by accident before they can get to a laundromat. Then he opens the windows to help the lingering smell dissipate.

“Tell me that was the worst-smelling exorcism of your life,” he pleads when Marcus emerges.

Marcus chuckles. “Top ten for sure.” He cocks his head. “Top five, even.”

“Sometime I am asking you about the other four, but not tonight. Maybe when I need gross-out stories to impress Luis.”

Marcus’ eyes twinkle. “As long as you give credit where it's due. Gotta keep up my reputation, especially if I’m to go from honorary uncle to official.” He grins wider at Tomas’ shock, then turns away to get dressed.

“You're really thinking about it? Even after what the demon said?” Tomas’ heart pounds, and not just because he's staring at Marcus’ lean, pale body twisting as he maneuvers into clean clothes.

“Something I don't get about demons is this: they've each, _personally_ as immortal beings, been obsessed with hating us since the day we climbed out of the trees, and yet they're still so stupid about us. They don’t get that the spook you can't see is always scarier than the one caught and dragged into the light. Virgil King's squatter actually helped untangle some things for me.”

“Would you explain, please? I could use some untangling.” It’s easier to ask than he thought it would be. This is something they learned to do during his apprenticeship, when getting Marcus to make the implicit explicit was a matter of safety.

Marcus gives him a curious look and nods assent, sitting down cross-legged at the edge of one bed. Tomas sits facing him on the edge of the other. Marcus holds up a hand, fingers outspread. He folds down his thumb. “My parents are old hat. I stopped flinching at everything demons said about them before I took my O-levels.”

“Your what?”

“Erm, before I turned 16.” He folds down his index finger. “Timing. I'm not fussed. We just got back to good; why would either of us bring in another big change without a reason?” Middle finger. “My role. I'm surprised the demon even had the nerve to broach that, considering God's hand is all over it. Doesn't matter what I think my role is or should be; it's been made _abundantly_ clear my place is with you.”

Tomas feels more tangled-up than ever about some of that, but at least now there's a hefty dose of admiration woven into the knot. “You reframed what it said very quickly.”

“Demons say nothing but twisted-up garbage all day long,” Marcus reminds him patiently. “It's _best_ just to throw it all out, but if you're going to pay attention to something you have to translate it first.” He shifts, looking uncomfortable, and folds down his ring finger. “Sex.”

“That was the first one that made you flinch a little.”

“It hit that particular nail more or less right on the head, but it was nothing I didn't already know.”

“It's only too late to learn something new if you're _dead,”_ Tomas argues, leaning forward and taking Marcus’ hand.

Marcus laughs softly, like Tomas has surprised him, then falls silent as Tomas presses a dry kiss to his palm. Even fresh from the shower, Marcus’ skin has a faint scent of its own, and Tomas’ eyes close as he breathes it in. He rubs his cheek into Marcus’ hand, feeling calluses scrape over his stubble, and opens his eyes at Marcus’ shaky exhalation.

Marcus looks - stunned, his mouth slightly open, color high in his cheeks. “Oh,” he says.

“And the part about properly wanting was just a lie. There's no proper way to want. Want just is.” Tomas feels strangely authoritative for once, a man oft-ruled by myriad wants.

To his delight, Marcus moves his hand of his own volition, stroking his thumb over Tomas’ cheekbone. “So it is,” he murmurs.

Tomas would like nothing more than to continue on this subject, but there's one more remaining. He holds Marcus’ eyes. “Marcus. The last thing it said hurt you the most.” So much Tomas lost his temper and stormed in after the thing.

Marcus’ hand stills, and he looks down, but he doesn’t pull away. “Well,” he says unsteadily, “you’ve already said it wouldn’t be like that, for your part. So who am I to trust: some grotty little soul infection, or my best friend?”

Tomas tries not to clench his hand on Marcus’. “Does that mean you believe me?”

“I’m starting to. And…” he flicks his gaze back up again and grins crookedly. “More than that, I _know_ you. I doubt you've done anything without feeling in your entire life.”

Tomas can hardly breathe. “And what about… for your part?”

Marcus blinks. “For mine? Oh! No, of course it would be real for me. That’s why I couldn’t bear it if it weren’t real for you.”

Tomas’ breath leaves him in a rush. “Good,” he says weakly.

“I thought that was obvious.” The lines on Marcus’ face are infinitely tender. To Tomas’ utter shock, he closes the last of the gap between them and kisses Tomas. It’s a soft, gentle thing, and Tomas is just shifting to deepen it when Mouse pounds on the windowsill.

“Oi! Put your canoodling on hold and get out here before we starve to death!”

Tomas stares in horror. “How long have you been standing there?” he shouts back.

“Long enough to let you get to the important bit; you’re welcome. Now come on! I bet this is _exactly_ the kind of town where someone will serve me half a cow on a bun and call it a burger.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for grown men flirting like kids. Uh, vagrant kids who yell Bible verses at supernatural beings for a living.

This isn’t the first time Marcus has drawn Tomas sleeping, but it is the first time he’s felt able to think about why he enjoys doing so - beyond a general appreciation for lovely things. Not that that isn’t excuse enough! The delicate olive-brown of Tomas’ skin looks perpetually warm, as if he carries the touch of the sun everywhere he goes. Aside from the flecks of white here and there, his hair is such a deep, true black that the highlights are blue, like raven’s feathers; the growing light from the window picks out those flashes of blue now. It’s enough to make Marcus want to try drawing with color. For now he’s content to trace out the peaceful slackness of Tomas’ mouth, the fan of his lashes against his cheeks, in between bites of Esther King’s banana bread.

He enjoys watching Tomas wake up, as well. First his nose twitches as the scent from the room’s little coffeepot bubbling away reaches him. His lashes flutter, his thick brows pull together, personality pouring back into his sculpted face. As handsome as Tomas is, it's his soul that makes him beautiful - even when he’s squinting and pouting and rubbing his eyes like a drowsy toddler.

“Morning, sunshine.”

“Ugh.” Tomas scrubs the sleep out of his eyes and looks over at Marcus: boots propped on the tiny table, sketchbook in his lap, angled toward Tomas. “Were you - drawing me?”

Marcus ducks his head a little, then smiles slow and wide. “Sure was.” He waggles his eyebrows at Tomas, then smiles wider when Tomas looks away bashfully. Two can play at this game.

Tomas struggles into a shirt and jeans, fills a mug from the coffeepot, then slumps over to the other seat, shoving Marcus’ feet to the floor on his way. “What are you eating?”

Marcus shows him the banana bread. “I saved you half.” He breaks another chunk off his half-loaf and pops it into his mouth, enjoying the heavy sweetness and the crunchy bits of walnut.

“How can you eat that?”

“Are you kidding? This stuff tastes how it must feel to have a grandmother.”

Tomas’ face skips right over sympathy (Marcus is thankful for this - it was his cocked-up childhood and he’ll be flippant about it if he wants) to incredulity. “I was a _parish priest._ I’ve eaten enough banana bread for seven lifetimes.” He wraps the half Marcus saved back up and pushes it over. “It’s all yours. I’ll go find us something with protein in it later.”

“Your loss.”

Tomas curls the top of his foot behind Marcus’ calf. “If it makes you happy, _cariño,_ then I think it’s my gain.” Marcus rolls his eyes a little, but he doesn’t pull away from Tomas’ foot. Experimentally, he extends his other leg and rubs it against Tomas’ knee, and the surprised delight on Tomas’ face fills Marcus with a spreading warmth, like he’s just taken a huge swig of hot coffee himself.

A couple of days later Tomas brings everyone breakfast: muffins from a nearby bakery, so fresh they’re still hot, complete with salted butter to melt into their steaming, cakey insides - and half of them are banana-nut. He plays footsie with Marcus again at the table they’re sharing with Mouse and Bennett, his face perfectly composed and innocent even as his sock feet work their way up to Marcus’ inner thigh. Marcus gets through the meal by pretending to be poorly-rested and concentrating on the food, and as soon as they’re back in their room he grabs Tomas by the waist and traps him against the wall with a hand beside his head.

 _“You,”_ he says, “are incorrigible today.”

“The shoe is on my foot now,” Tomas grins cheekily at him, and Marcus realizes he got the idiom wrong on purpose. He doesn’t actually _decide_ to kiss him; it just happens, and he experiences the completely new sensation of someone laughing into his mouth.

Tomas’ laugh morphs into a pleased hum as Marcus cups his face and kisses him in earnest, and then into a moan as Marcus surges against him, overcome by the need to feel his whole body at once. Tomas gives as good as he gets, warm and solid and trying to climb Marcus like a spindly tree.

Marcus notices he's hard at about the same time he feels that Tomas is too, and it jolts him back to reality. “Mouse and Bennett will come looking for us soon,” he says, pulling away regretfully.

Tomas looks a sight. Hair mussed, face flushed, his lips wet and swollen. Marcus feels the heat in his eyes like a brand. “For the record,” Tomas growls, grinding the heel of his hand against his erection to calm it down (good old trepidation and a baggy sweater already got the job done for Marcus), “you are invited to put me in that position _anytime.”_

“Made an impression when we met, did it?”

 _“You_ did.”

“So did you.” Like the scratch of a stuck record jumping to a new track, or suddenly regaining the ability to see in color again when everything had faded to greyscale.

Tomas closes his eyes and clenches his jaw. “You need to back up and stop looking at me like that,” he grits out, “or I am going to poke someone's eye out with this.”

Marcus chuckles and does as he’s told for once. “Well, we can’t have that,” he drawls, and Tomas thumps his head back against the wall.

 _“¡Joder!_ It's no good, you're too sexy right now, just go and tell the others I'm in the bathroom.”

Marcus laughs as he leaves, but then he considers that Tomas may actually be… _relieving himself,_ because of the effect Marcus had on him, and suddenly his baggy sweater doesn't feel like much coverage at all.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marcus gets the first li'l punch on his V-card! *sniff* I'm so proud of my baby.

Tomas institutes a minor change to their rare nights in: they sit together, in contact, as they read or draw. It doesn't feel particularly contrived, because oftentimes the four of them gather in one room. It's only gentlemanly to let Mouse have a bed of her own to sit on (plus she needs the space if she's cleaning her guns), and Bennett claims all hard, flat surfaces for his papers and laptop, so smushed together on one bed it is. They just… keep smushing even when they're alone. It's nice, low-key, Tomas' thigh just resting alongside his, or his lower legs on Marcus’ lap (often with Marcus propping a book or sketchpad on his shins) or his ribs nestled against Marcus’ knee as he stretches out on his belly to read.

Marcus has never had this much touch before. He's a compulsively tactile person, he knows this about himself, but he mostly touches _things_ , not people (aside from the possessed, but they're _his,_ his charges). Somehow Tomas had been placed immediately at first meeting onto the list of Things Marcus Touches, and Tomas had often responded in like kind, but this type of intentional, prolonged contact is wholly new. It often feels less like lust than gluttony, like his skin is feasting somehow.

They're alone tonight, side-by-side in their underthings, and Marcus is working with his favorite charcoal crayon, the one worn down to a nubbin. When he grunts softly in pain and puts it down, flexing his fingers, Tomas notices and sets aside his book.

“It's my own fault; it's really too small to keep using. I should just switch to a different one.”

Tomas holds out his hand. “May I?”

Marcus lets him take his hand and grunts again, this time in pleasure, when Tomas starts massaging it. He works his way from the wrist down, milking every metacarpal and finger as well as the spaces between them.

“That feels heavenly.”

Tomas’ smile is shy. “Abuelita had arthritis. I used to do this for her.”

Marcus briefly considers getting upset about this comparison, but then Tomas adds, “But I didn't do this,” and follows the same path his hands took with kisses.

It's such a simple little thing, but it still makes Marcus feel weak, hot, just this side of overwhelmed - and a little frustrated with the force of his own response. “Does it not drive you mad, going so slowly? With me.”

Tomas thinks about this for a minute - or maybe he's just focused on sniffing the backs of Marcus’ fingers, and then the tips. Smell, Marcus has noticed, is nearly as important to Tomas as touch is to Marcus. When he looks at Marcus’ face, his irises are almost entirely black, barely a sliver of green around the margins.

“Yes. But I love it.” He draws Marcus’ index finger into his mouth, licking it all over and sucking it thoroughly, watching Marcus shudder with reaction. The _pop_ when he releases it sounds obscene. “It is a great privilege to share all these first times with you.”

“You don't need to be delicate with me. I'm not fragile.” He may be lying about this. He does feel fragile at times, vulnerable and exposed in an unprecedented way.

“Slow and gentle are not the same as delicate,” Tomas argues, but he also rolls to sit on Marcus’ lap, so Marcus still awards a point to himself. Tomas’ sturdy weight is an anchoring comfort, his strong thighs a shelter to keep Marcus from flying apart - something sorely needed when he has to contend with things like Tomas whispering in his ear, “I don't want to miss any new reactions from you. I want to savor them all, and learn what you like best so I can do it again and again,” and then _nibbling on his earlobe._

Marcus makes a strangled noise and grabs at Tomas’ waist. Abruptly Tomas’ tshirt seems like the most offensive barrier in the world, and he scrabbles at the hem until he finds his way under. He slides his hands over hot, hot skin, the hard ripples of Tomas’ abdomen with its soft fur and the broader swells of muscle at his chest with its crinkling hair, drinking in the vibration of Tomas’ moans in his ribcage.

It definitely feels like a form of gluttony.

Tomas shuffles down a few inches, rucks up Marcus’ singlet, and all but falls on his chest like he's been holding himself back - and he has, Marcus realizes, he's been waiting for Marcus to take the lead on this boundary. He could yell at Tomas about how he's feeling his way in the dark with all this and suggestions are definitely welcome - or he could hang onto him for dear life as Tomas thumbs his nipples and then, seeing the way Marcus quakes, licking and sucking at one while he gently rolls the other in his fingertips.

“Oh, _oh,_ oh, my God.” He twists and arches in Tomas’ surrounding hold, kneading fretfully at his skin. It’s like his body can’t decide if it wants to get away from the stimulation, or get more of it.

“Talk to me, Marcus. Do you like that?”

“What do you think?” Marcus’ chest is heaving, fine tremors skittering over his whole frame. He's so hard he aches.

“I-” Tomas rolls his hips, letting Marcus’ cock dig into his abdomen and grinding his own against Marcus’ thighs (give or take a couple layers of cotton), “-I need to hear you say it. That you're close, that you want me to keep going.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am, I do.” He’d have thought he’d be more nervous about the approach of his first orgasm with another person, but he can’t be, not with Tomas so warm and close, pouring pleasure over him like a baptism. “Make-” he forces a deep breath, “make me come.”

Now it’s Tomas’ turn to shudder, and he slides up again so their cocks can press together and he can kiss Marcus - wet, hot, an uncoordinated, needy clash. “Marcus,” he moans, “your voice like this, I can feel it inside me.”

“Oh?” Marcus barely recognizes his own voice, huskier than he ever makes it on purpose. “Like that idea, do you?” He can't actually say _me inside you,_ but the thought is - arresting.

 _“Yes.”_ Tomas rears up to look Marcus in the eye, still rubbing his nipples with both hands. “When I need to come very badly, I just imagine getting on my knees for you and taking you in my mouth.”

Marcus can feel something shimmering under his skin, like light through rippling water. “Tomas…”

“Like communion.”

 _“Fuck!"_ The light bursts, his vision whites out, and half his body would probably bow off the bed if Tomas weren't pinning him down. He gasps through it, shaking, as Tomas rubs his sides soothingly and murmurs, “Beautiful, so beautiful, Marcus.”

“I think that's my line.” His voice is a ruin. He must look a right mess: face wet, singlet up around his armpits, spreading damp patch on the pants he never bothered to remove. Tomas doesn't seem to mind, still moving in his lap - rather more restlessly now - moaning with every breath.

“I can smell you,” he whines, face all but buried in the crook of Marcus’ neck.

“Yeah, you did that for me, love.” Somehow, without changing positions at all, they've gone from Tomas holding Marcus down to Marcus holding Tomas up. Tomas’ thrusts get faster, and as ragged as his breath. “You can let go now, you did good.”

“Ah! Marcus!” Tomas goes rigid, then collapses onto Marcus. Marcus can feel his cock pulsing, creating another damp patch. It's a swamp down there; they'll have to do laundry tomorrow.

“So,” he remarks to the ceiling, stroking Tomas’ back idly, “that's shagging.” Barely, he supposes, but it feels pretty fucking intimate to him so he's going to count it anyway.

Tomas shakes them both when he laughs. “I hope it was worth the wait.”

Marcus yawns. “Bloody brilliant.” He could resent the chain of events that cut him off from this for decades, but on the list of Things Marcus Could Waste His Time Resenting, it doesn't even make the first hundred. Much better to spend his time cheerfully jostling Tomas during a cursory wipedown and donning of dry underthings, every last vestige of their already pitiful personal space having evaporated.

“You are like an octopus,” Tomas laughs as they get under the covers.

Marcus plasters himself to Tomas’ back and runs his hand up and down his front. The skin of Tomas’ abdomen buckles as he draws his knees up slightly to make room for Marcus. It amazes Marcus that he can contain this man, span the length of his body with his own (if not quite the breadth - Marcus keeps up a respectable wiry strength but Tomas is _dense_ with muscle). He mouths the nape of his neck, and Tomas draws his hand up and kisses it.

“You like my hands,” Marcus observes, not for the first time (but for the first time out loud).

“I like your everything, but yes, your hands are a particular favorite.” Tomas reaches back and blindly pats his cheek. “That and your face.” Marcus turns into the touch and then pulls a grotesque face, and Tomas dissolves into giggles.

The next day, en route from one research task for Bennett to another, Tomas pulls him into an art supply store. “I was going to surprise you with another one of those charcoal sticks, until I saw how many kinds there are. So instead, I want you to just pick out the one you like.” Marcus has never shopped intentionally for what he draws with, nor has he ever seen his favorite charcoal labeled in English, but his fingers find the right kind easily enough. Afterwards, his fingers leave black smudges on Tomas’ jaw when he kisses him, blending into his beard.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marcus Keane: world's sexiest 54-year-old virgin.

Mouse takes Tomas with her to meet with a source, and when Tomas gets a look at the location and finds out they're going back the next day, he persuades her to make it a four-person trip - and to go earlier than the planned meeting time.

“Tell Bennett it's for security.”

“‘Course I will, because it's the truth,” she says with a wink. She finds their courtship enormously entertaining. Even Bennett limits himself to a look of silent judgement when he sees the music store.

Marcus is like a kid, flipping through the crates of old vinyl records and making more and more excited noises at the artists therein. Tomas had recognized a couple of the names from his collection of battered cassette tapes, and hoped he might react this way.

“Whaaat is a treasure trove like this doing all the way out here?”

Mouse frowns over his shoulder. “I've never heard of any of these. This seems more like a place has-beens and never-weres come to die.”

Marcus beams at her. “Darling, you just described the entire phenomenon of northern soul. The bigger the failure, the rarer and more valuable the music.” He plucks an album and practically skips over to the store’s turntable, flipping the record in his fingertips before setting it under the needle. He sways his hips and bounces on his toes all the way back to Mouse, who laughs at him but lets herself be pulled into a dance.

“Oh my God, how old were you when they played this stuff in public?”

“Old enough to sneak out, and if I worked at it, old enough to sneak _in.”_ Tomas can picture him: a lanky boy, wearing something bulky to look older, dancing with frenetic energy and listening hungrily to once-discarded music exhumed and exalted.

Mouse tolerates being twirled between the aisles amiably enough for several minutes, then glances at the clock and calls out, “Come get your man, Tomas!” Marcus releases her with a final spin - she only walks a little unsteadily as she and Bennett disappear into the back room of the store - and advances on Tomas, who holds up his hands.

“Oh no no, I don't dance.”

Flushed from exertion and in high good humour, Marcus’ smile is especially dazzling. Tomas always thought feeling weak in the knees was just an expression, but now he knows better. Marcus takes him by the waist and hand, urging him away from his perch against a table. “You do now.”

Tomas has always felt stiff and awkward when he tries to dance, but something about the way Marcus moves is infectious. It makes it easy to move with him. “There, you see? Nothing to it; you just let the music in.” His voice curls around Tomas like sweet smoke. He's almost absurdly seductive.

“How are you _so_ flirtatious, when the Church had you since you were a child?” He blurts it out and immediately regrets it, but Marcus doesn't look offended, just thoughtful.

“Maybe I do it more _because_ of that. Nobody takes vows against having a laugh.”

“Something you could get away with.”

“And that could get me things I wanted - or needed. Helps to be charming when you're trying to get in a family’s good graces.”

“Yes, I've seen you do that.” It works for Marcus because it's not a put-on. Even if moments ago he was shouting invocations with terrifying conviction, he can switch gears and find some genuine friendliness with which to smooth over relations. Tomas thinks it's because both the fierceness and the gentleness come from the same source: a love that burns more brightly than in anyone else Tomas has ever met. The love of God. Demons run from it, and people can't help being drawn to it. Tomas certainly couldn't. “Has it ever gotten you into trouble?”

“Ha! Plenty of times. Come on a little too strong, suddenly I've got a jealous spouse or stressed-out Novice Director on my hands. Or someone who wants to ignore the collar.”

“Were you ever tempted to ignore it with them?”

Marcus grins. “Not half as much as when I met you.” But then he must see something in Tomas’ face and remember Jessica, because he says more seriously, “They got into me too early, Tomas. The job was all I had.”

“You grew around it.”

“Like a tree around a bicycle,” Marcus agrees cheerfully.

Bennett bursts out of the back room, shouting, “It's a trap!” The store owner is hot on his heels, face smoking where he's been splashed with holy water. Demonic growls sound from deeper inside the store.

Marcus sighs and rolls his shoulders. “‘Course it is.”

They leave the music playing as they go to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. [One of multiple trees found having grown around a bicycle. ](https://imgur.com/FyJgR9r)
> 



	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *muffled screaming*

Tomas crumples to the floor of their new motel room the minute the door opens, rolling to lie on his back and stare at the ceiling. Every muscle in his body aches. “Are we sure Bennett's not still possessed?”

“That's just Bennett.” Marcus doesn’t sound like he's in much better shape from his spot by the door, where he's letting the wall hold him up.

“He snapped a demon's neck with his bare hands.”

“I've seen him do it with his feet, with half his blood on the floor.”

“Oh. I thought he was a - an office type.”

_“L'Ufficio Di Esorcismo.”_

“Ah.” Tomas falls silent, and Marcus limps over and nudges him with his toe.

“Don't stay down there, your muscles will seize up. Bad enough we had to drive over two state lines before we could rest.” He extends a hand and helps Tomas to his feet.

“I still think we should have made it three,” Tomas grumbles as they stagger into the bathroom.

“Since when are you the cautious one?”

“Since that demon in the music shop plucked from my head that they can sic _la migra_ on you. Until now only the Vatican ones knew it.” Virgil King's demon knew, but it had been too fixated on the concept of marriage to consider the threat that first put it in their minds.  

Marcus crouches to unlace his boots, and does Tomas’ too while he's down there. “Mouse killed it hard enough I don't think it's going to tell its little friends.”

“If one can learn it from me, any of them can - and if even one that knows gets away, it will tell the others.” Tomas is beyond exhausted, churning with the unique misery of sleep deprivation, but his brain hasn't made the fear up out of nothing.

Marcus straightens up and urges Tomas out of his clothes, then gingerly peels off his own. “There's something I want to say to that, but I don't know if it would make you feel better or worse,” he says with his head stuck inside his undershirt.

Tomas starts running the shower. “Go ahead. At least it will stop me going round and round.”

“Let’s get cleaned up first.” They support each other stepping into the shower, and pause while they give the miracle of hot running water its due.

Tomas would have thought their first time completely naked together would be both sexier and more awkward, but they're too tired and sore to move anything but slowly, washing off blood and grit, sweat and road dust. Tomas still looks, though: Marcus seems ancient and ageless, all long lines and sharp muscles and scars, marred here and there by bruises and abrasions. All his sparse hair is that reddish-blond shade that takes eons to go grey; Tomas has more grey hair than him. His cock hanging soft and vulnerable between his legs fills Tomas with a clenching tenderness.

At last Marcus says, “If a pack of demons got a fix on my whereabouts, they wouldn't call it in to a police force, no matter how many children those police have locked in dog kennels to die of thirst. They'd just take me for themselves, to turn or kill.”

Tomas hugs his sides. His throat hurts. Marcus draws him into his arms and continues, gentle and pitiless as God, “The same is true for you, and Mouse, and Bennett. All our little family is much too wanted to hand over to some other party.”

“We're going to die in this war, aren't we.” Tomas hates how small his voice sounds. It's one thing to stake his life to save another when that other is suffering right in front of him; it's something else to confront the fact at a remove, as an inevitability, not just for himself but for his friends - and for _Marcus._

Marcus traces his spine, his shoulderblades, the tops of his hips. “I mean, probably, yeah. You can't tell me you don't know that.”

“No, I - I know. I just seem to have forgotten how to carry that knowledge tonight.” His hands steal around Marcus’ waist. “I’m so tired, I can't remember what to do.”

“What we've been doing. Keep a low profile, be moving targets, watch each other's backs. Keep fighting. And… trust in God.”

Tomas laughs wetly. “How did we end up with _you_ telling _me_ that?”

“Guess it's just my turn, love.” Marcus’ face is lined with worry and affection.

 _“Te amo.”_ He can't believe he never just said it before. Somehow it makes him feel a little lighter, despite everything - especially feeling the way Marcus trembles briefly and holds him tighter, like he needed to hear it.

 _“Yo también te amo,_ Tomas.” He closes his burning eyes and squeezes Marcus back; apparently he needed to hear it too.

And then Marcus’ collarbone is right there, and he wants to kiss it, so he does. And Marcus tilts his long, graceful neck slightly, and Tomas wants to kiss it all the way up to his ear, so he does that too. And then Marcus groans softly, and Tomas finds he's not _completely_ exhausted after all - and neither is Marcus.

Marcus looks down at their stirring dicks with disbelief. “Seriously?”

Tomas shrugs, an embarrassed smile stealing back onto his face. “It _has_ been a stressful day.”

“Motivational speeches and handjobs,” Marcus mutters, taking hold of both of them, “who have I become?”  

“Ha! _Oh.”_ They're really too fatigued to be doing this, punch-drunk, but Marcus’ hand on him is as centering as it is arousing, pulling him out of his head and back into the here and now. He reaches down and joins his hand with Marcus’, containing their cocks a little more snugly.

“Mm, ha, that _is_ nice.” Marcus is starting to sound a bit breathless. Tomas rocks his hips and moves his hand, and Marcus’ cock gets harder in their shared grip. Marcus tips his head back to expose his throat, working as he swallows, and Tomas feels his own cock firming up as well. He leans in and licks a broad swipe up Marcus’ neck, sucking hard where it joins his jaw. Marcus jerks against him and works his free hand into Tomas’ hair, dragging him into a kiss. They don’t seal their mouths, breathing raggedly as their tongues stroke and curl together, echoing the hot, wet tangle of their hands and cocks below.

Tomas finds a way to slide his cock in parallel to Marcus’, a long grind against his whole length, and Marcus gasps and thrusts his tongue entirely into Tomas’ mouth, where he promptly and gratefully sucks on it. Marcus’ guttural moan resonates in Tomas’ sternum; he can feel Marcus’ abdomen flutter as he struggles to keep breathing and thrusting while also writhing in reaction.

He still gets overwhelmed so quickly when their touches escalate; Tomas suspects he barely even touched himself for a long time before all this. It makes him want to drown Marcus in pleasure, wash away the memory of years of solitary sublimation until his skin knows only this, only comfort and passion and Tomas. But he remembers, too, the complicated intensity of his stolen moments with Jessica, trying to do everything at once because they might never have another chance; he remembers how it didn’t always feel entirely good. He doesn’t want that for Marcus, so he follows Marcus’ lead, lets him set the pace. When Marcus touches his cheek and pushes back a little, Tomas breaks the kiss and rests his forehead against Marcus’, trying to slow his breathing.

But that wasn’t what Marcus was after. Two of the fingers on Tomas’ cheek slide onto his tongue, and Marcus raises an impish eyebrow. “Go on, I know you want to.” Tomas shudders and sucks them extravagantly, far harder than he dared on Marcus’ tongue, hollowing his cheeks. Marcus lets his head fall back again, laughing shakily through his teeth.

Marcus may be new to sex, but he understands better than Tomas how to ride a wave of joy when one finds him.

And he doesn’t miss much, either. “Your _mouth,_ Tomas, bloody hell,” he murmurs, with a knowing glint in his half-shut eyes and an absolutely sincere rumble in his voice that makes Tomas’ cock twitch. He gives as good as he gets, answering Marcus with a deep pull that makes Marcus stammer as he goes on. “I c-can’t stop thinking about what you said, before. Kn-kneeling for me.”

Tomas’ hips jerk, and he moans around Marcus’ fingers in his mouth, clutching at the small of Marcus’ back like he can somehow pull him closer while they’re still fisting their cocks together.

“You’d make a sacrament of it, opening those fucking lips of yours like it was a gift, like you were _hungry_ for it, f-for me. Anywhere,” Marcus continues raggedly, arm muscles bunching as he keeps jacking them, “You’d let me do it anywhere, wouldn’t you? You want it that much.”

Tomas moans again as he nods slightly, flushing so hot, all the way down his chest, until he’s surprised the water doesn’t sizzle where it hits him. His balls are drawn up tight, his whole body quivering on the edge.

“You’d make it so good,” Marcus says wildly, “you always do. Such a good - a _good boy-”_

The noise Tomas makes as he comes is practically a shout, crushing Marcus against the wall, spending between them, his eyes caught and held by Marcus’ electrifying blue gaze, his mouth full of Marcus’ fingers, his arms and hands full of Marcus’ body.

He releases his fingers to say, “I _will,_ Marcus, I will do it, I want to, I will right now if you ask.” _Please. Please let me do that for you. If not now, soon._

“Kiss me,” Marcus pleads, “just kiss me, I’m so close.” Tomas takes his mouth again, and speeds the rhythm of their hands, and feels Marcus’ cock jump and pulse in their fingers as it coats them hotter and slipperier than the water wreathing them in steam.

Marcus sags in his hold, after, blinking owlishly as Tomas releases their cocks to lick his hand clean of their combined come. It’s not as good as it would be to bury his face in Marcus’ groin, filling his head with his scent and his mouth with the weight of him, but even this much makes an aftershock rip through him with almost as much force as his initial orgasm.

Maybe Marcus isn’t the only one easily overwhelmed by all these first times.

Their exhaustion catches up with them then, all the more powerful for being briefly deferred, and they can barely turn off the water and towel themselves vaguely dry before lurching into bed. Tomas is unconscious before his head hits the pillow.

* * *

In the morning - or maybe it’s afternoon - he wakes up with his face mashed into Marcus’ belly. His first instinct is to travel south, finally taste Marcus’ cock by waking him with his mouth, but then he remembers himself and glances up to see if Marcus is actually asleep. He isn’t.

“Hello,” Marcus says softly, petting Tomas’ hair. Just the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles makes Tomas’ heart crack with love. “Sleep well?”

“Yes.” He kisses the nearest bit of Marcus he can reach - the jut of his ribcage. “Thank you, for last night.”

“You seemed in a bad way. Better now, yeah? Everything feels a hundred times worse when you’re knackered.”

That’s true, but the other thing standing between Tomas and despair is Marcus, with his strength and his solace. “When I first got the idea to marry you,” he says slowly, “I think maybe I thought, _at least I can protect him from this one thing. This is one way I can be sure he won’t be taken from me.”_

Marcus keeps petting his hair. “I mean, you still could. Just because it’s a lesser concern doesn’t mean it isn’t a smart idea. Besides…” he sounds suddenly shy, absurdly so for a man who just last night shoved his fingers in Tomas’ mouth and made him come with words alone, “you’ve made it quite clear that it’s something you _want_ to do, for its own sake.”

Tomas stares. “You haven’t actually said yes.”

“You haven’t actually asked.”

The world slows down and goes quiet, like it sometimes does in the middle of a fight, or at the moment of exorcism. The only thing Tomas can hear for a second is his breath in his lungs, his heart in his chest. He moves weightlessly, as in a dream, slipping out of the bed, folding to his knees beside it, Marcus sitting up to face him with his eyes getting steadily wider. He holds out his hands, and Marcus takes them. Tomas squeezes them for courage, and Marcus squeezes back. Tomas can feel the faint tremor in them.

When he speaks, it feels as simple and monumental as professing his faith. “Marcus Keane. Will you marry me?”

Marcus breathes out harshly, and tears fall from his eyes when he blinks. “Yes,” he whispers, “God help me, yes I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Bennett is canonically exactly that badass. 
> 



	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Telling the family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty huge spoiler for the end of S2 in this one. You may want to hold off on reading if that matters to you.

Tomas bursts into Mouse and Bennett’s adjoining room, flinging the door open so hard it bangs against the wall, startling both of them badly. A bag of frozen peas falls off Bennett’s eye, and Mouse scowls at Tomas as she bends to pick up her awl. Her combat boot is still upside-down between her knees - or, no, that’s a new one. She’s either trialling a new modification, or upgrading a pair for Bennett. Either way it’s not important right now.

“He said yes!” he shouts.

“Who?” Mouse asks in the polite way that means she’s thinking strangling thoughts.

“Marcus! I asked him to marry me and he said yes!”

 _“Finally,”_ Bennett groans.

Mouse looks subtly horrified. “Oh Lord, now you won’t just be courting. You’ll be _engaged.”_

“Not for too long, I should hope,” Bennett says mildly.

Tomas scrubs a hand through his hair. “No, no, you’re right, Bennett. Just long enough for Olivia to meet up with us for the wedding.”

 _“What?”_ Marcus hollers from their room.

Tomas turns in the doorway. “I would rather face down Lucifer himself than my sister if I got married without her there.”

“...That’s fair,” Marcus concedes.

Mouse holds up a hand. “Alright, I’m very happy for you both, truly, and planning and executing this wedding will be very exciting given the lives we lead, but. Tomas. Dear.”

“What?”

_“Please put on some trousers.”_

* * *

_“Sí,_ Olivia,” Tomas says for what seems like the thousandth time, still pacing around the motel room. The tinny warbling from the cellphone sounds slightly less agitated half an hour in. _“Sí. Lo siento. Lo sé.”_ He pauses. _“Sí. Nosotros haremos eso, lo prometo. Sí, en el momento que lo sabemos.”_ Another pause, and he smiles. “ _Yo también te quiero. Adiós.”_ He hangs up and sighs heavily, but he looks lighter.

“Still got a bit of your skin on, then?” Tomas holds up his thumb and forefinger nearly touching, and Marcus chuckles.

“As I’m sure you heard, I have to tell her the place and time the _instant_ we decide on them.” He grins. “Also, Luis is _very_ excited to finally have a cool uncle.”

“Cool Uncle Marcus,” he muses, “I like the sound of that.”

Tomas shoves him in the shoulder. “What's this? Not defending my honor?”

Marcus smirks. “Your honor, sure. Your coolness, not so much - ack!” He cackles as Tomas jumps him, tussling on the bed until they risk rolling off it.

Tomas subsides, panting, having play-fought his way to being nominally on top of Marcus. The glee in his face is infectious, and once again Marcus kisses him without consciously planning to do so. Tomas kisses back as best he can considering he can't stop smiling.

He stares into Marcus’ eyes after, expression turning thoughtful. “Tomas Keane,” he says experimentally.

“No,” Marcus answers instantly, shivering with revulsion. “Absolutely not. I won't let anything of my father come anywhere near you.” He swallows hard, trying not to gag.

“Shh, alright, that's fine,” Tomas reassures him, “it was just a thought.” He strokes Marcus’ hair, pressing firmly on his scalp, which does more to settle Marcus than any number of words. When Marcus’ breathing has slowed and the tension is mostly gone from his frame, Tomas cocks his head and says, “Marcus Ortega,” and Marcus tenses up in a completely different and much better way. This close he can see Tomas' pupils dilate; he likes the idea too.

 _“Now_ you're talking,” he breathes, and Tomas kisses him in earnest. He pushes Marcus’ mouth open with his own, sighing his breath into Marcus’ body and all around his face. Marcus hums his pleasure back. It feels as if they're feeding on each other, providing some vital element that can only be gotten via exchange. _This is my body, given for you._

It's aimless, for once, that first surge of arousal satisfied with closeness alone, softly nipping and sucking at each other's lips, tongues brushing slowly. Just - knowing one another. Marcus’ hands roam, because that's what they always do, but it's not to stimulate, just to map out the shape of Tomas in his arms, shifting in slow contentment against him like a cat making biscuits.

When Tomas lifts his head and talks, it feels like a continuation of the same intimacy. “I'm going to marry you,” he says, “you're going to join my family and be my husband.”

“Yeah, and you'll be mine. My husband,” Marcus echoes, in the same hushed and wondering tone. It’s something he never even conceived of clearly enough to long for.

Tomas rests his head on Marcus’ chest. “I wish I could marry you in the Church,” he says. “Beautiful, holy things make the places they happen beautiful and holy, but I still wish it.”

Marcus’ hands slow in their roaming, and then stop entirely. “Now _there's_ a thought. D’you reckon Olivia could drive to and from Indianapolis on a day off?”

* * *

“Francesca,” Marcus says jovially into his phone, “my God, it's been a while. How have you been? Mmm. Mm-hm. No, you're taking the piss! Really?...Me?” His grin falters. “Oh, you know, not much. Got excommunicated, took on an apprentice, agreed to marry him-” he winces and holds the squawking phone away from his ear.

Tomas catches Marcus’ eye. “I'm going for a walk,” he whispers. Marcus nods and waves him off. He’s not sure he wants to listen to Marcus sum up the last few years - many parts of which were extremely painful, for one or both of them - to a friend Tomas has never met. Besides, there are a few more things he needs to get done.

He goes next door to check in with Mouse and Bennett. “Marcus is asking a friend of his to officiate. A, um, a ‘Roman Catholic Womanpriest’.”

Mouse gapes. “A _what?”_

Bennett closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s practically a _latae sententiae_ offence just to be in a room with one of that lot. Why am I not surprised Marcus has a friend among them?”

Tomas looks at Bennett sharply, seized by sudden concern. “You’ll still stand up with him, won’t you? You’re the closest thing to family he has.”

Bennett shrugs. “The way things are going, if you’re _not_ automatically excommunicated several times over, are you even living?” Mouse elbows him, and he says, “That means yes. Of course I will.”

Tomas breathes out heavily and nods. “Okay. Good.” He turns to Mouse. “I was hoping you would stand up with me.”

She blinks. “Me? Not your sister?”

“I want my sister to be there - in the audience, where she can get down safely in a hurry if she has to. Indianapolis is close enough to Chicago that I want someone up at the front with marksmanship skills and a shotgun full of consecrated rock salt.” Bennett, erstwhile papal security liaison, nods approvingly.

She grins. “A literal shotgun wedding. I love it. I’m in.”

“I also want you up there because you’re my friend, Mouse.”

Her smile turns uncomfortable. “Would you look at that? We’re well over my feelings limit for the day. Out, you.” She means it, shooing him unceremoniously out the door.

Tomas anticipated this, and already knows where he’s going next. They've never been to this particular little Midwestern town before, but they've been to so many he feels like he has. He knows exactly how to find his way from the roadside motel into the heart of the town and start looking for a church. He wonders if this is how Marcus feels all the time, fluent in the layout of places built by people, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

The first open church he finds isn't Catholic, but he doesn't need it to be. He just wants the hush, the high ceiling, the colors in the windows: pathways to the sacred laid down in his mind before he could read.

He crosses himself and murmurs the Our Father, and then hesitates. It's not often that he prays without form.

“I've done this all out of order,” he says at last, “talking to the parents is supposed to come at the beginning of a courtship, not the end. But it didn't occur to me to think about it that way until now. So, here I am.

Lord, You looked into a dark and terrible place and laid Your hand upon Marcus Keane, claiming him for Your own. When he broke, You sent me to him. When he judged himself unworthy, You sent him back to me. Now I seek to keep him with me until the end. I believe that our love is a gift from You, and that our union will honor it.

You've never spoken to me the way You speak to Marcus, and I don't expect You to start now. I guess I just wanted to say - thank You, for bringing us together. I promise to try to be worthy of this gift every day.” He sits in the holy quiet for a little longer, and then gets up and moves on.

Back at the motel, Marcus is _still_ on the phone; he's had to plug it in, actually, and is now sitting at the table near the outlet, scribbling on a sheet of scrap paper. When he sees Tomas, he covers the receiver and mouths, “Verity.”

That's right; they were about due for a call from her. “Tell her I said hi,” he says, and Marcus nods.

“Yes, I'm still here. Tomas just walked in, is all. He says hi, by the way.” He covers the receiver again. “She says hi back.”

Tomas starts rounding up their dirty laundry. Marcus says, “I guess it was about 20 feet in diameter? I wasn't paying close attention… Well, because I've blessed plenty of water and it's never made a shockwave before or since, but demons often cause pressure changes when they move around… Clever girl, that _is_ why we board up the windows.”

Tomas doesn't mind admitting he was less than thrilled when he found out Marcus was decanting his knowledge for Verity Kim. He'd worried it was some kind of self-flagellation for killing her father, and he'd been (hypocritically, he knows) afraid of Verity putting herself in danger by staying involved in their world. _She deserves answers,_ Marcus had argued, and, _Who knows? Could be the worst mistake demonkind ever made was going after Andy Kim._ It probably _is_ a penance, but he doesn't appear to suffer for it; if anything he seems to enjoy being interrogated by her. Maybe it’s nice for him, to talk about his profession without the pressure of being responsible for someone’s safety at the same time.

He catches Marcus’ eye and hefts the laundry bag before heading out again. Marcus makes a complex hand waggle that means he’ll come catch up, while saying, “Places and things? I don’t doubt it, but things you can just get rid of, and places you can just leave - they’re just big things, really. Only people are worth the dangerous work of trying to save... Yes, I suppose that _is_ a very white perspective; have you not seen me with your eyeballs? They don’t come much whiter outside a cave…”

That’s not quite fair, Tomas reflects as he strolls back into town, bag on his shoulders. Even the palest bits of Marcus have the odd brown freckle, and can flush a very pretty pink - like they did last night in the shower. He’d been so beautiful in his bliss, breathing hard, veins and muscles standing out. Tomas is so preoccupied with the memory that he overshoots the laundromat by almost a block and has to backtrack.

He was also too distracted to remember to bring a book, something he kicks himself for once he has nothing to do but stare at their clothes spinning in the washer. He spends too much time in altered states to enjoy being even slightly hypnotized, and deliberately lets his mind wander to distract himself. He wonders, if God was in the habit of speaking to him, what He might have to say about him and Marcus getting married.

_I SAY IT’S ABOUT ME-DAMN TIME! HAH! SEE WHAT I DID THERE?_

It’s nothing like his visions. Those begin innocuously, wandering into strange dreamscapes to discover lurking horrors. This is more like being hit by a bus made of light and love and the seething, ceaseless energy of all the life in the universe. It’s the Milky Way overhead when they’re so far from anywhere they might run out of gas, and Abuelita’s warm hand engulfing his own tiny one at the airport. It’s being tumbled by a massive ocean wave, and the first time he smelled Luis’ tuft of downy newborn hair. It’s Angela Rance crushing her demon’s head beneath her heel, and - yes, Marcus was right - it’s a big, blousy woman shredding on guitar and wailing blues to a raucous crowd.

“Oh, my God.”

_THAT’S RIGHT, NOW LISTEN UP. I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR MY KIDS._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Verity’s characterization here is _directly_ informed by the flawless Verity fic [Semper Clara](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16045292) by st_aurafina.
> 



	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dramatic cuddling in a self-serve laundromat.

Marcus is halfway to the launderette, mulling over the latest of Verity's questions he hadn't been able to answer, when his phone rings yet again. He's about to reject the call without answering when he realizes the number is Tomas’ latest burner.

“I'm just about there,” he says fondly, to no answer. “...Tomas?”

Heavy breathing, and a clatter like a cheap mobile being dropped. Marcus sprints the remaining blocks with his heart in his throat.

It's a fully-automated self-service place, no attendants. Tomas is the only person in it, huddled in a back corner between a washer and the wall, phone on the floor beside him.

“Tomas?” Tomas doesn't respond, and at first Marcus thinks it's another vision, but Tomas’ irises are visible, if unfocused, and his posture is - active, crouched, fingers splayed on the wall and floor, not the horrible doll-like passivity typical of his visions. It's not a vision, but something is very, very wrong.

“Tomas, what is it?” He comes closer, and Tomas flinches.

 _“¿Quién está ahí?”_ he demands, too loudly and without turning his head toward the sound of Marcus' voice. Marcus starts to feel his pulse in his stomach as he gets his first inkling of what's going on.

He closes the remaining gap between them, and Tomas shrinks away from the vibration of his footsteps and flails in front of his face. Marcus catches his wrist in one hand and with the other he reaches for the back of Tomas’ neck. The touch is familiar, and it brings Marcus’ wrist close enough for Tomas to smell him. Relief floods Tomas’ face.

 _“Marcus,”_ he sighs, and folds into Marcus' chest. Marcus gathers him up. He didn't think he could clench his hands any tighter, but then Tomas says, “God says hello,” and some joint in his knuckles creaks dangerously.

“It's not fair,” he mutters into Tomas’ hair, trying not to alarm him by letting the tears fall, “it's not _fair._ He shouldn't have to bear the visions and this too.”

As if he can hear Marcus beyond the vibrations in his chest, Tomas continues, “She didn't want to cook your brain by talking to you again so soon. And I've never taken a turn. When you said God was loud you were really understating things, you know that?” Marcus brings Tomas’ hand to his face and nods.

“You said, when She came to you, that the blindness lasted an hour and the deafness lasted a day. I hope you weren't understating that too.” Marcus shakes his head, then traces three rapid circles around Tomas’ ear, and squeezes his ring finger for good measure.

Tomas chuckles. “Not deafness; more of a ringing. Is that it?” Marcus nods again. “Okay. An hour. I can do that. Will you help me sit so we look less like crazy people if someone else comes in?” Marcus steadies him as he gets up, and leads him to the bench where their empty laundry duffle is sitting crumpled in front of the only running washer in the place.

Tomas lays his head on his shoulder. “I'm glad you found me first.” Marcus’ arms around him tighten so much Tomas grunts and he has to consciously ease off.

That seems to be all Tomas wants to say until he can at least see. They sit in the quiet, broken by the thudding of the washer only Marcus can hear. The warm, humid air smells of wall-dispenser detergent: sharp, soapy, chemical-citrus. Tomas is relaxed against him, under Marcus’ hands, which can’t stop moving on him like _he’s_ the one struck blind (again).

The washer finishes its cycle, and Tomas lifts his head from Marcus’ shoulder. “Something changed. Did the washer just stop?” At Marcus’ nod, he says, “You should move our clothes into a dryer. I’ll be okay.” Marcus squeezes his knee and gets up, trying not to laugh hysterically. Tomas seems so unearthly sometimes, a saint in the making, but then he can also be startlingly practical. Marcus has never eaten better, worn cleaner clothes, or spent less time getting arrested than in the company of Tomas. Maybe that’s what being raised by an actual caring adult gets you.

“Marcus.”

He straightens up too fast and whacks his head on the edge of the dryer. “Shit!”

“Are you okay? That looked like it hurt.” Marcus turns, still rubbing his head, and stares at Tomas, who is looking right at him.

“Oh, thank God.” He collapses at Tomas’ side and hugs him fiercely. “Can you hear me as well?”

“Barely. It's like I'm underwater, or just came home from a loud concert. Look at me when you talk and I should be able to manage.”

Marcus nods and sits back, hands on Tomas’ shoulders. “You recovered faster than I did; that's good.” It's only been about half an hour.

Tomas looks suddenly stricken. “When it happened to you, you were alone. What did you do?”

“Held on very tightly to the railing, and hoped I didn't fall off the end of the dock and drown like a numpty.”

“And before that you were a child - alone with a demon!” It's always a strange sensation, someone expressing belated outrage for the boy Marcus was. After all, he's clearly survived everything life's thrown at him so far.

“It happened just as the demon was leaving, and I was barely dazzled, bit of ringing in the ears. Maybe it's easier the younger a person is - squishy brain or something.” That would explain how Tomas recovered in about half the time Marcus did.

Tomas’ smile is breathtaking. “Are you calling me soft-headed?”

“Bit unlikely, innit? I’m usually calling you the opposite.” Marcus clunks their foreheads together for emphasis. Tomas laughs softly and snatches a kiss, then another one, deeper and slower, but it doesn’t feel carnal, just - joyful.

When he pulls away, his eyes are wide. “Marcus,” he whispers, _“I saw God's face. She_ spoke _to me.”_

It hasn't escaped his notice that Tomas keeps saying _She,_ but it seems like a question for another time. Now that Marcus’ terrible fear is receding, Tomas’ excitement and wonder are infecting him. “What did God say?”

“She's happy for us.” Tomas’ smile is fierce, exultant. “And She has a gift for us.”

* * *

_-Chicago-_

The one who is one with Liddell Crawford, head of the Chicago Teamsters, slides into the corner booth already occupied by the one who is one with Police Superintendent Jaffey.

“Where's Ervin?” asks Crawford.

“He won't be joining us. Working late.”

“Sucks to be him.” Jaffey has better taste than to agree openly, but he’s also glad he didn't integrate with the head of the stock exchange. However, the one who is one with Ervin Hart seems to enjoy the relentless accumulation of wealth, even at the expense of other pleasures. His behaviour is virtually indistinguishable from before. Crawford continues, “Well, out with it.”

“What's your hurry? Let me pour you a drink.” Jaffey pulls a bottle of champagne out of a bucket of ice and pops the cork with relish. “I will give the apes this: they have developed booze to a _very_ high degree.”

“Probably because they've been obsessed with rotting fruit since they had tails,” Crawford sneers, but accepts a glass. “What's this about?”

“We're celebrating. A little bird told me that the old grey lion and the little cub will be at a church in Indiana next week.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *dun dun dunnn*!

_-Rural Indiana-_

There is a tense moment when the Chicago convoy arrives at the meet location and finds the church parking lot already partly-filled with black rental cars of the sort favored by Vatican employees.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Jaffey wants to shout at his erstwhile co-conspirators, but he keeps his voice modulated as befits a police superintendent. _He_ won’t give himself away and end his corporeal joyride prematurely.

“Collecting on an investment we thought lost, and if all goes well, collecting on a couple of debts at the same time,” says some priest. The Vatican contingent is pitifully depleted; Jaffey supposes they can’t afford not to follow up leads in person as they try to rebuild. “You?”

“Probably the same debts,” Jaffey admits. He sees several other little knots of people standing around, third irises rolling curiously. “Seems someone is playing multiple tables.”

The doors of the church swing open, and a trim black man steps out. “Just one table, but I want to make sure all interested parties have a seat at it.” Jaffey startles at his mild voice; it’s the supercilious security liaison who caused so much trouble during the papal visit.

“Father Bennett,” the priest says, jovially menacing, “we’d heard you were exorcised.”

“You heard wrong,” Bennett intones, “I’ve just been doing a little work on the ground.” He rolls a livid orange iris into view and gives the priest a dispassionate look up and down. “You should try it sometime.”

Jaffey stifles a bark of laughter; others don’t bother. The Vatican bunch _do_ tend to be soft, fat slugs. Too much hedonism, not enough striving for glory.

“Cut the crap,” says Crawford, “are they really in there?”

“See for yourselves,” Bennett says, stepping to the side, bowing slightly, and gesturing into the church in a single smooth motion. It’s a not-so-subtle dare as well; don’t hesitate stepping over the threshold of the church, or risk losing face in front of everyone. How Jaffey had hated this man as an opponent; how pleased he is to have him as an ally! He walks into the church with high hopes that he will find something equally gratifying inside.

He is not disappointed. The old priest and the young priest are both there, tied back-to-back just in front of the altar. They’re sagging in their bonds, and their faces are bruised everywhere visible with duct tape covering their mouths, but they’re very much alive.

For now.

 **Oh, Bennett, my wayward son,** says the Vatican priest, forgetting himself and growling in his true voice, **all is forgiven.**

Jaffey keeps pace with him as he stalks down the aisle. “The Friars of Ascension have first claim on these two, as they betrayed and murdered so many of our brothers.”

“I don’t think so,” says one of the random strangers Jaffey doesn’t recognize. “So they interfered in your business affairs; so what? For us it’s _personal._ My brother was _so close_ to having a home here when they came in and fucked it all up.”

They quarrel all the way to the front of the church, drawing in a tighter and tighter ring around the two exorcists, who are staring up at them in terror. Jaffey understands that their mouths are covered to prevent any one party jumping the gun with an ash summoning for their faction, but once everything’s been sorted out and they’re in the hands of the Friars where they belong, the gags are coming off. He wants to hear _everything._

He hears a noise behind him, and when he turns to look, Bennett is gone and the church doors are shut. He's not the only one who notices; a murmur of suspicion moves through the crowd.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s a trap,” Jaffey says with sudden certainty, and is not surprised to hear a truck rev its engine outside and thud against the church doors. He thinks uneasily about how any sensible church springs for a decent sprinkler system since they burn candles so often, and about how this far from anywhere the church’s water supply is undoubtedly a cistern.

Then the sprinklers come on, and Jaffey knows nothing for a few moments but deafening howls and the blinding agony of holy water.

When he has the wherewithal to look up, he sees the priests shrugging off their ropes (which must never have been properly tied in the first place) and peeling the duct tape off their mouths. They rise to their feet, holding hands, facing the demons convulsing on the floor as if addressing a congregation. The young one goes curiously stiff, and his eyes blaze with a light too terrible to look upon. He seems to transmit the same stiffness to his partner, who opens his mouth to reveal the very same light. 

When he speaks, the one who is one with Jaffey recognizes the voice. Or rather, the Voice. It was spoken into being by that Voice, as were all of the Host and, indeed, the universe. It fled to the darkest and strangest reaches of existence to escape it. Hearing it now feels like its very self is being rent apart - torn away from the stupid ape Jaffey who believed a few pretty lies and an appeal to his tiny ape ambitions, and also shredded into so many pieces it might never be a Self again. It might truly turn to nothing but ash, and blow away on the wind.

_YOU DON'T HAVE TO COME HOME, BUT YOU CAN'T STAY HERE._

The last thought of the one who was one with Jaffey is _at least I'll never have to hear another one of Your lousy jokes._

* * *

The last of the demonic howling ceases abruptly, and all at once Tomas sags like his strings have been cut, and just about topples onto his face before Marcus catches him.

“I’ve got you, there you are, love,” Marcus says lightly, but Tomas can feel the tremor in his hands. “How are you feeling?”

Tomas wants to say _deflated_ or _empty,_ but he doesn't think he can explain how it's a good feeling. For the last week, God's gift has made him feel distended and strangely weightless, like a balloon. That feeling is gone, the weight returned to his limbs, but it's more a relief than a burden. At last he settles on, “Back to normal.”

“Such as it is,” Bennett says mildly, coming in the back entrance with Mouse. “You just projected illusions into the minds of two dozen integrated demons.”

“Not a big illusion,” Tomas argues, “just your eye.” Their bruise-makeup is already mostly washed off.

 _“And then you exorcised them,”_ says Mouse. The sprinkler system is still running, but no one is sizzling or twitching. A few are writhing, but it’s with their faces in their hands and their shoulders heaving with sobs. Others are sitting limply and staring into nowhere, desolate.  

“We didn’t,” says Tomas, with absolute certainty, “God did. And I don’t think it will happen that way again for a long time, if ever.” This was, in its own way, a wedding present. It’s still not exactly _safe_ to visit Olivia and Luis in Chicago, or for Bennett to go home, but it's saf _e_ _r._

“I can’t remember the last exorcism I was at that didn’t end with _someone_ needing medical attention,” Marcus reflects.

“Some of those burns might,” Bennett points out, “especially on the older hosts, but they all look well enough to seek it themselves.”

“What should we do for them?” asks Tomas. Not one of the roughly two dozen people is looking at him or Marcus. Usually he feels a connection between himself and the ones he helps, but this time he was barely involved.

“We should go,” Mouse says firmly. “They gave up their free will, by force or by choice. What they need now is to start using it again. C’mon, there’s towels and dry clothes in the van.”

“That much water might destroy the building. I feel sorry for the congregation that uses that church,” Tomas says as they drive away.

Marcus snorts. “Don't. Pack of bloody skinheads, the lot of ‘em; you and Bennett wouldn't be safe within a mile of that place on a Sunday morning. Let ‘em sit on folding chairs in a school gym for a while; maybe they'll learn something walking past the kindergarten posters.” There’s a bitter edge to his voice, and he scratches unconsciously at a spot on his ribs Tomas knows for a fact sports a long scar. Tomas reminds himself once again to stop being surprised that Marcus has been everywhere and met everyone.

“Now, Marcus,” says Bennett, “what do we tell Francesca we were doing all morning?”

With an air of weary obedience, Marcus drones, “Renting a suit, and convincing me to wear said suit.”

“And what do you have to do to sell this story with no further time gap?”

“Wear the suit you rent me without complaint.”

“Just exactly so. Everything is ready to pick up on our way back to Francesca’s house.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night before the wedding.

_ -Indianapolis- _

“I'm going to kill Bennett,” Marcus fumes that night, when they finally make it back to Francesca’s guestroom and get a look inside their rented garment bags. 

“Actually,” says Tomas, staring at the dove-grey suit and sapphire tie intended for Marcus, “I think I might kiss him.” He can already tell Marcus will look positively edible in it. 

“There's  _ color!  _ I've no experience wearing color; I'm liable to break out in a rash.” 

“You've worn color before: yellow and blue, at the convent back in Chicago.” Not the best example; the shabby, too-small clothes had looked like they were pulled from a donation box.

“That doesn't count. I was nunned into wearing those so they could wash my other things.” 

Tomas cracks up. “I don't think nun is a verb.” 

“Sure it is,” Marcus grins back, “look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn't have known Francesca used to be a nun if I hadn't told you.” 

Tomas surrenders. “Okay. She definitely nunned at you when you reached for the potatoes instead of asking for them.” He takes his own suit out for a look. 

“Oh,  _ you  _ get to wear black,” Marcus complains, but he sounds a little breathless. 

“I think it's more of a charcoal?” Tomas does actually sympathize with Marcus’ insecurity; his clerical gear was all he needed to look presentable since almost before he became a man, and Marcus lived that way for much longer. Staring down the sleek lines of the suit and glossy burgundy tie, he feels himself to be on very uncertain ground indeed. “Can I really pull this off?” 

“Mmm, you can let  _ me  _ pull it off you tomorrow night,” Marcus purrs, sliding a hand around Tomas’ waist and propping his chin on his shoulder. 

Tomas swallows hard. The way Marcus is draped around him, lanky and affectionate, makes him want to gather him up and then lay him out, make him clutch and cling and call out Tomas’ name. “What's this?” he says desperately, gaze falling on a small pink paper bag with handles. 

Marcus picks it up. “Dunno. I think it's from Mouse.” He pulls out a bunch of tissue paper and then two loops of lace. “What on earth?” 

Tomas’ mouth goes dry. “They're garters.” 

“They are  _ not,”  _ Marcus argues comfortably, “these are too loose to hold up a sock on an elephant.” He stretches one and fires it into the air; the elastic is so weak it barely goes up a foot before coming down. 

“No, they don't - hold up anything anymore. A bride wears one; I guess it's a joke on Mouse's part, getting one for each of us.” 

Marcus dangles the garter, peering through it. “Does Mouse need her eyes checked? Neither of us have calves this big.” 

“They don't, um, go on the calf. Look,” Tomas says helplessly, “roll up a pants leg and I’ll show you.” 

Marcus cackles, “Smooth. You're lucky I'm a sure thing,” but he does it, pointing his toe to strike a pinup pose he probably thinks is comical but that makes Tomas feel mildly frantic. He’s not entirely in control of his own body as he kneels and guides the smaller garter up onto Marcus’ thigh, just above the knee. 

He stares at the innocuous band of frilly white, his heart starting to hammer in his chest. 

“Hey,” Marcus says, touching his cheek, “is this doing something for you?” His voice is so gentle suddenly. Tomas closes his prickling eyes and nods, bending his head to kiss Marcus’ knee. The lace is very soft - Mouse went somewhere expensive. It makes Marcus’ leg hair feel coarser, even more obviously male. 

“I learn something new about myself every day that I’m with you,” he chokes out, and has to draw a deep breath after he says it, and is hit with an overwhelming roll of Marcus’ scent. He nuzzles up his thigh and presses his face to Marcus’ crotch, throwing one arm around his waist and the other behind his knees as he just breathes him in. 

Marcus strokes his hair unhurriedly, as if Tomas can’t feel him through his pants, growing thicker and harder by the second. “That week of abstinence starting to catch up with you at last, is it?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Tomas mutters. He’d been burgeoning with holy energy, and it had made his libido feel somewhat remote, like all his inner channels that usually flowed with his own love were occupied by God’s instead. And more than that, he’d wanted to - make it special. Their wedding night. Let them save themselves up, just a little. He groans.

“What is it?”

“I still want to wait,” he grinds out, “but I want you  _ so much.”  _ Marcus’ cock twitches against his jaw, and he turns into it, breathing out harshly like the force of his wanting can get Marcus out of his pants and into his mouth. 

Carefully, Marcus says, “Do you… want some help?” Tomas clutches him tighter and nods. “Okay.” Marcus slides his hand to Tomas’ crown, winding his fingers into his hair, and then takes a firm grip and slowly pulls Tomas back. Tomas whines under his breath and resists the pull, until Marcus says, “Just hold on for me, just a little longer, there’s-” he clears his throat and forges on, “there’s a good lad.” 

It’s his hushed, urgent voice, the one he uses when the souls of the possessed surface for a moment and he’s trying to pour love and strength into them as fast as he can, and it works on Tomas too. He shudders as something settles in him, and he eases his weight back onto his heels and looks up at Marcus - who is staring down at him, wide-eyed. He licks his lips. “Thank you.” 

_ “Jesus,”  _ Marcus moans, and falls to his knees himself. “How are you even  _ real?” _ He seizes Tomas’ face and kisses him like - well, like he’s desperately hard and hasn’t gotten off in a week. It’s not doing much for Tomas’ resolve, so recently hard-won. 

“Marcus,” he gasps between kisses, “Marcus, you chose to help me wait. I have to assume you want to wait too.”

“Dunno if I can,” Marcus mumbles, shivering in Tomas’ arms like a candle flame. “You don’t have to see yourself.” 

Tomas buries his face in the crook of Marcus’ neck and hugs him as hard as he can - and then slightly less hard when Marcus wheezes. “We can do this,” he says, as much to himself as to Marcus. “We were priests; we held out for years. We can make it one night. God,” he laughs suddenly, “how the hell are we going to  _ sleep?”  _

“Oh, I’m going to kip on the sofa,” Marcus says. 

“You will  _ not!”  _

They bicker about it all through washing up, perhaps making more of the issue than it deserves but clinging to that normalcy. He catches Marcus grinning at him and smiles helplessly back.  _ We are still us,  _ he thinks,  _ and after tomorrow we will still be us. _

At last they settle on a challenge: they’ll both lie down on the bed, and whoever stays awake the longest can slip out to sleep on the couch. 

They wind up facing each other. “54 years of sleeping alone, bar being wedged against someone on a bus or train, and you've gone and gotten me hooked in a few weeks.” Marcus’ eyes glitter in the dimness between slow blinks. His hand has ceased its idle stroking at Tomas’ side. Tomas has high hopes of winning their little competition…

...But at some point he throws out an arm in search of Marcus’ warmth and finds nothing. He swears under his breath and tiptoes out of the guestroom, moving carefully in the unfamiliar house. He brings one of the blankets from the bed with him. 

Sure enough, Marcus is curled like a cat on Francesca's overstuffed couch. He long ago mastered the art of sleeping in any and all circumstances (and of silently enduring the resulting stiffness - Tomas should find an excuse to give him a backrub tomorrow). For now he drapes the blanket over him, as gently as he can; Marcus is also a light sleeper, easily startled awake. This time he only shifts in his sleep and makes a little noise, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. Tomas congratulates himself and, after one more long look at his fiancé, goes back to bed. They've got a big day tomorrow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. [Marcus’ suit](https://imgur.com/CossTCj)
>   2. [Tomas’ suit](https://imgur.com/ie9CuKd)
>   3. Tomas’ weakness for Marcus in lingerie owes its existence to [this life-changing ficlet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13534512/chapters/31131477).
> 



	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Put on a funny hat and let's DO this thing, baby!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Thanks to [Arae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arae/pseuds/Arae) for some [suggested wedding music](https://youtu.be/QZPIZtiVGOc)! 
> 


Marcus looks at his own reflection and feels about ready to jump out of his skin. He almost does when Tomas looms into view in the mirror. “Gah!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Tomas says, hands out. “I just wanted to see if you needed help with your tie.”

“Yeah,” he admits, “if I ever knew how to do the blasted things I've forgotten now.”

“Understandable,” Tomas chuckles, and turns him to start working on the obstinate strip of silk.

“How do _you_ know how to tie a tie?”

“Luis.” A few tugs more, and Tomas steps back and surveys him. “There, take a look.”

“Huh.” The blue tie does actually look good, he thinks; it makes his eyes pop, or something. The suit fits well; it wouldn't dare do otherwise with Bennett phoning in their measurements. He looks - like a man on his wedding day. “Not half bad.”

“You look amazing, Marcus.”  

“Nah, that's you, love.” Tomas, who is at all times so attractive he thinks over half the human race has stuttering problems, is blisteringly so in his suit. Less severe than clerical garb, the dark grey sets off the dramatic black of his hair, and the burgundy tie brightens the green of his eyes. It _really_ makes Marcus want to try drawing with color.

“I am so nervous,” Tomas confesses, “I've been to hundreds of weddings-” Marcus doesn't doubt it: photogenic priest, venerable stone church - Tomas can probably recite an entire Nuptial Mass with less mental effort than it takes to brush his teeth, “-but never thought one of them would be my own.”

“At least you won't forget the words?”

Tomas laughs. “The couple being married has the easiest lines for that reason.”

“I know. I've presided over one or two… dozen, myself.”

“What? Really?”

“Mm-hmm.” Marcus picks at his bracelet. “Exorcism is a crisis for a family; crises have a way of crystallizing things for some people. Not uncommon, when I was able to stick around, for someone to ask me to marry them and their sweetheart.” He'd always felt vaguely wistful, watching the joyful faces of two people who only had eyes for each other, knowing he'd been set apart and always would be.

At least, that's what he'd thought, until Tomas. They’re still set apart by the nature of their work, but it's _their_ work now. Marcus has been a conduit for divine grace enough times to recognize what Tomas was carrying last week, and channeled through Marcus yesterday (even if it had never been _quite_ so… _personal,_ in the past). God is in them; God is _with_ them, even as they prepare to do this thing that was once forbidden (and still is, according to Rome, but Marcus has never given less of a fuck what they have to say on a matter).

The knot in the ancient leather finally comes free. “Ah! There we are.” His wrist feels chilly as he unwinds the string.

“What are you doing?”

“I know Mouse has the rings-”

“She does, and I think you’ll really like what she did with them.”

“-but I just, well, thought I should contribute something myself.” He takes Tomas’ hand and wraps the leather string around his wrist. He's never oiled it, but it's been in contact with his skin for - God, years, and takes the new shape easily. He reties the knot and flicks the medal. “St. Benedict. Exorcists don't have an assigned patron saint, but he's the obvious choice.”

Tomas touches his wrist, then brings his fingers to his mouth. “It smells like you.”

“Probably more of me there than the original leather,” Marcus says, growing uncomfortable, “you know what, it's a grubby old thing, I should just-” he goes to take it off again, but Tomas snatches his wrist away protectively.

“I love it. I'm keeping it.” His face brightens with an idea. “You should have mine!” He removes his gold necklace and puts it on Marcus. “From my abuela: the cross at my first communion, and the St. Benedict medal when I left for seminary.”

Marcus fingers the chain, still warm from Tomas' neck, watching the two charms glitter and clink against each other in the mirror. He tucks it under his shirt, against his skin, and hides his face in the crook of Tomas’ neck. If he tries to say anything at all he's going to burst into tears. Tomas holds him tightly.

He hears a honk from outside, and sniffs hard. “That'll be Olivia. You should go meet her, let me pull myself together.”

Tomas kisses him then, and for all that Marcus can sense his leashed ardor it's - sweet. He pulls away and his smile is mischievous. “Are you wearing the garter Mouse got you?”

“I am, and you'd better be wearing yours. You _know_ she's going to want pictures.” Not to mention Tomas’ _extremely interesting_ reaction to seeing it on Marcus last night. Marcus has put a large bookmark in that topic, to explore further at a later date.

Another honk, longer, like Luis is being allowed to lean on the horn. “Go, go, I'll catch up.” One more swift kiss and Tomas is out the door.

Marcus takes one last look in the mirror: dressed up, pink-cheeked, with hidden gold on his chest and hidden lace on his thigh. The ghosts of his parents stalk the borders of his mind, reeking of alcohol and blood, but he murmurs out loud, “Marcus Ortega,” and they shrink back. He nods firmly and goes out to join the tiny wedding party for the walk to the tiny chapel.

* * *

It's just a little space in the larger ‘interfaith centre’ where Francesca works, but it's quite beautiful: airy and bright, with abstract stained glass casting patches of color all over the room. Marcus’ awareness becomes similarly fragmented upon walking in the doors. He's conscious of:

Francesca, even more apple-cheeked and iron-grey than the day Marcus stood with her while she received ordination from the hands of a lady bishop (incurring an automatic excommunication). Her white collar looks somehow both jarring and perfect above her grandmotherly bosom; Mouse keeps shooting her _very_ complicated glances. They all know female Protestant clergy, of course, but it means something that's hard to put into words, having Francesca take them through the paces of a traditional Catholic wedding mass.

Olivia, shoulders quaking, streaming tears enough for her and Tomas’ mother and grandmother as well as herself, and smiling through those tears. Beside her, Luis, who can't stop beaming and shooting them thumbs-up. He arrived with an absolutely enormous bouquet of flowers, stuck them through every buttonhole and pinned them to every dress in sight, and handed the remainder to Mouse with a flourish so smooth it shocked a laugh out of her. Marcus had shot him a thumbs-up of his own for that; he'd clearly taken Marcus’ advice and practiced.

Mouse, who in light of God's wedding gift opted not to bring her shotgun full of consecrated rock salt, saving a lot of explanations and alarm. She almost certainly has holy water and a rosary in her purse, though. She looks soft and happy enough in her rented dress to remind Marcus why he was so infatuated with her twenty years ago. Beside her, Bennett, who has almost single-handedly elevated this bizarre little gathering into a genuinely beautiful moment. He’s impassive as always, but Marcus has known him forever and detects a definite air of satisfaction - with his own successful planning, no doubt, but perhaps also with seeing a happier-than-usual fate for two of his comrades.

But mostly, he's conscious of Tomas. Tomas, who seems to always glow with the love of God but is so radiant right now he looks like an angel walking upon the earth. Tomas, who only has to look into Marcus’ eyes for his roiling excitement to subside into a simmering joy. This is his best friend, the man he loves, who loves him, and they're getting married. _Thanks be to God._

Going fully traditional was the right call; they can both navigate the order of service without having to concentrate on anything but meaning it when Francesca walks them through their vows. The most startling moment is when Mouse produces the rings: plain gold bands, but apparently there'd been enough time to get them inscribed on the inside: VRSNSMV-SMQLIVB, the same prayer as on the St. Benedict medals, _‘Begone Satan. Never tempt me with your vanities. What you offer me is evil. Drink the poison yourself.’_ Tomas was right; he does like it. They give them over to Francesca to be blessed, and slide them onto each other's fingers, and Tomas kisses him like the first breath of air after being born, and that's it. They're married.

There are a few more parts of the ceremony to get through, including communion, the first for both of them since getting excommunicated. It was Francesca who encouraged them to choose the full mass, knowing communion would be a part of it. _Rome is wrong about this and you know it,_ she'd said, _the Eucharist was never theirs to withhold, only to give._ They take it one after the other as a married couple, and it feels so - normal. The old and the new becoming one. All the other blessings and prayers, and the signing of forms that was the impetus for this whole business, pass in a daze.

They file out of the chapel, and Francesca claps her hands once and rubs them together. “That's that! Let's eat!”

* * *

The only record that exists of the reception following the wedding ceremony is a series of photos on Mouse's and Olivia's phones: 

  1. Marcus and Tomas standing on either side of Mouse with their arms over her shoulders, each with one pants leg rolled up to reveal their garters, all three of them laughing. 
  2. All attendees dancing with each other in various combinations, including everyone dancing with Olivia and Luis. 
  3. Marcus and Tomas being bundled into a taxi, and then kissing in the rear window as the taxi drives away.
  4. Bennett with his tie around his forehead like a bandana. 
  5. Bennett asleep on a couch, hugging a traffic cone.



 


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *banging pots and pans together* WED-DING NIGHT! WED-DING NIGHT! WED-DING NIGHT!

There was a party; Marcus knows there must have been, but he can't for the life of him remember any of it right now. There's just him and Tomas, suit jackets and waistcoats hanging open, hands all over each other in the back of a cab. Smart call, someone - they're both outside of a significant amount of wine, though it’s not half as dizzying as Tomas’ mouth.

 _“Hola, soy Tomas Ortega,”_ Tomas says giddily in between kisses, _“y este es mi esposo, Marcus Ortega.”_

Marcus laughs breathlessly as Tomas nuzzles up and down his neck, so quick and light it mostly tickles from his beard. “We're - haha! - we're totally legitimate practitioners, h-here to perform your, pfft, sanctioned exorcism!” he titters, as quietly as he can.

“Oh, like we weren't working out of the back of a speeding truck already.”

“Heehee, keep your voice down, the cabby!”

“Keep our rosaries a little more visible, no one will notice we're down another collar.”

“Mm, yes, very convincing,” he pulls Tomas up to kiss his mouth properly, drinking in Tomas’ low hum of desire like more wine.

“My God, I can't wait to get you alone,” Tomas growls. “How much farther to this B&B?”

“‘Are we there yet?’ Seriously?”

“I feel like time is slowing down.” Tomas bounces in his seat like a frustrated child.

At last the cabby announces, in long-suffering tones that suggest time was slowing down for him as well, that they have arrived. Marcus tips him extra for putting up with the drunken newlyweds, and they bundle out with their bags to get a look at their home for the next week.

“D'you think the separate cottage is a hint we've been too loud?”

Tomas propels him in the door. “I’m going to take it as permission to be as loud as we want,” he announces, slamming the door and fairly throwing their bags down.

Marcus may or may not make a _meep_ sort of noise as Tomas backs him up against the wall, nostrils flaring. _“Finally,”_ Tomas groans, molding their bodies together, rising slightly on his toes to meet Marcus as he sags against him. Tomas’ kiss is - an onslaught, one that Marcus has no interest at all in resisting. His arms wind around Tomas' shoulders as Tomas slides a knee between his knees, and snugs their hips tight together with his hands on Marcus’ ass. They're both hard enough to hammer nails.

Yes, Tomas’ libido has definitely come roaring back. Marcus was not surprised last week when Tomas suggested they wait until the wedding to make love again; it _was_ typically romantic of him, but even more than that Marcus is familiar with the aftereffects of a close encounter with God - like one's soul-stuff has been shaken to the point of fizzing over, and needs time to remember precisely how to live in a body again. Tomas had needed so much grounding touch it reminded Marcus of himself, but had seemingly forgotten his sex drive until last night.

 _Marcus_ ’ sex drive, on the other hand, is in the midst of a fucking _renaissance,_ and had _not_ appreciated the sudden loss of its first outlet since his own reluctant right hand. The heat in his groin feels like it's going to make his trousers start emitting smoke any moment now. He grinds down on Tomas' thigh, pressing harder and harder until Tomas is taking most of his weight on one leg without any noticeable difficulty, and it's that casual display of strength that shocks a wild moan from him, so loud it echoes in the room even muffled in Tomas' mouth.

Tomas kisses his jaw, his earlobe, his throat, and Marcus thumps his head back against the wall. “Tomas,” he pants, “Tomas.”

 _“Marcus,”_ Tomas moans back, fumbling with his tie, scrabbling at his shirt until he gives up and rips it open, scattering buttons everywhere. “You know what I want.”

“You'll have to do it soon,” Marcus warns, “or wait longer sti- _lll!”_ he finishes with a yelp as Tomas drops to his knees, bracing himself and Marcus both with his warm hands on Marcus’ bare waist. Like last night, he presses his face against Marcus’ clothed erection and sniffs it hungrily - but _unlike_ last night, he's also busy unbuttoning and unzipping, and a moment later he pulls Marcus’s trousers down, and his pants with them.

Marcus thought he couldn’t get any harder, but the way Tomas looks at his cock - pupils blown, mouth fallen open - and then lets his eyes drift shut as he takes his first tentative lick proves him wrong. Tomas licks him again, bolder now with the flat of his tongue, wetting him lavishly. Marcus' fingers twitch where they're splayed against the wall. He yearns to touch Tomas' face, pet his hair, but he doesn't know if he has enough control not to pull on it.

Then Tomas, eyes still closed, rubs his slick lips against the glistening head of Marcus’ cock, and then opens a little wider and takes him into his mouth, onto his tongue, and makes this little _sigh,_ like pleasure, like _relief._ Like sucking Marcus’ cock meets a _need_ for him, and it's that thought that punches Marcus’ breath from his chest and makes his hands start to shake. They wind up in Tomas' hair without his permission, just feeling the slick black strands between his fingers, the hot dome of his skull, and then trace down to his ears and feel the angle of his jaw stretch as he takes Marcus deeper with a messy slurp. His fingers flutter over Tomas’ hollowed cheeks, his cheekbones, his eyebrows, and Tomas’ eyes fly open and stare up into his own.

Marcus’ cock twitches, probably releasing a blurt of precome, and Tomas’ eyes widen and he groans through his nose and sucks _hard._  Bolts of pleasure shoot up and down Marcus’ spine; his thighs are shaking so hard Tomas’ hands on his hips are the main thing holding him upright. Desperate to neither come instantly nor grab Tomas’ hair and fuck into his throat, he starts to talk - babble, really.

“Christ, Tomas, so gorgeous like this,” he rasps, and then grits his teeth on a long, tremulous moan as Tomas tries a rhythmic sort of suckling that makes his hips jump in Tomas’ grasp. “On-on your knees, for _me,_ and I’m- you- you have me _inside you.”_ Tomas groans again at that, and lets go of Marcus’ hip with one hand. “Are you-? You _are,”_ Tomas is pulling open his own trousers to touch himself. “You like it that much?” Tomas squeezes his eyes shut and nods slightly, and bobs his head on Marcus’ shaft. “Ah, God, your _mouth,_ I can’t- it’s so-” he stammers, and Tomas nudges his hip with his hand, like he’s urging him to move, to go on, and as carefully as he can he rocks into- “hot,” he gasps, “hot, and wet, and _tight- nngh!_ And-and smooth, bloody hell, dunno how you’re m-minding your teeth but you’re doing a bang-up job.”

Tomas whines through his nose, and Marcus grins even as he’s panting like he just sprinted a mile full-tilt. “That’s right, innit? My man likes a bit of praise.” _His man_ \- the thought just about undoes him right there, but he keeps going, more aroused than he thought was possible. “And you deserve it, love. I didn’t know I could feel like this, but I should have. I should have,” he says, delirious, feeling himself speeding up what he senses is the final peak, “be-because with God all things are possible. Ahhh, _Tomas, I’m-”_ and then his orgasm seizes him and he goes into freefall, awash in sensation: his muscles strung tight, hips bucking, bollocks drawn up as he empties himself into Tomas’ mouth, which vibrates around his cock like Tomas is moaning loudly - not that he can be heard over the racket Marcus is making.

When he starts to recover he has to lock his knees not to collapse, drawing great whoops of air, and he looks down to see Tomas release him with such tender reluctance that it compels one last little splatter of come onto his cheek. Instantly Tomas’ tongue darts out to clean it up, and Marcus laughs and gives up the fight to keep standing, sliding down the wall to join Tomas on his knees.

The dreamy, languid way Tomas moves when Marcus pulls him into his arms is evidence enough, but he asks anyway, “Did you come? Just from doing that?”

Tomas nods, then swears weakly in Spanish when Marcus takes his hand and starts to lick it clean. The taste is - strong: salt, musk, and a hint of something almost meaty, like a heavy broth. Not something he'd get excited about on its own, but Tomas’ stunned expression is worth it.

“Guess I'll have to wait my turn to have a go, then,” he murmurs, and wipes the remainder off on his neck where he knows Tomas will smell it in short order. Tomas breathes out hard, with a whine on the end of it.

“You're turning me on all over again and I just barely finished coming,” he complains halfheartedly, rubbing Marcus’ sides where his ruined shirt hangs open below his tie, loosened but still technically knotted.

“Wedding night. S’traditional to fuck like rabbits,” Marcus says vaguely, already losing his train of thought with Tomas all over him, still looking like - well, like post-coital Tomas in a beautiful suit. He can feel the smooth metal of Tomas’ wedding ring sliding over his ribs, and the weight of his own on his finger. “Tomas, we did it. We got _married.”_

 _“Lo sé, mi corazón._ It feels like a dream,” Tomas confesses, and the hint of uncertainty in his voice makes Marcus’ chest ache.

“You wouldn’t dream me this full of scars and nightmares,” he says gently, “nor having our first married sex on the welcome mat, grinding pebbles into our knees.”

Tomas looks down in chagrin. _“Dios,_ I didn’t even feel it. Come on, there’s sure to be a bed here somewhere.”

“It’s behind you,” Marcus says as Tomas helps him to his feet, “I can see it from he- what do you think you’re _doing?”_ he demands as Tomas ducks his head under Marcus’ arm and lifts him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

“Carrying you over the threshold,” Tomas says merrily, striding for the bedroom of the tiny cottage as Marcus kicks and flails halfheartedly, not upset enough to do anything actually effective that might hurt Tomas.

“Don’t you dare! Put me _down!”_

“As you wish.” _Should have seen that coming,_ Marcus thinks as he sails through the air, landing on a huge mattress and far more pillows than any two people could actually use.

He glowers up at Tomas. “Don’t think this makes me the bride.”

“Never,” Tomas promises. He yanks his tie loose, opens the top two buttons of his shirt, and then struggles out of the entire top half of his suit at once. “Although-” he says about halfway through this impractical but entertaining choice, his voice muffled by several layers of fabric, “-I do maybe feel like-” he pulls free and tosses the whole thing away, then beams at Marcus, “-I have won a prize.”

He looks impossibly young and strong, beautiful and virile (and adorably rumpled with his hair standing on end and his cock hanging out of his trousers), and _he_ calls _Marcus_ a prize, with every appearance of sincerity. To be fair, he _did_ woo Marcus with everything he had from the word go. And… Marcus already made the deliberate choice to believe him over an infernal demon; maybe he can choose to believe him over personal demons, too.

He takes a deep breath. “Seems you have. What do you plan to do with me now?”

Tomas’ eyes darken. “I thought I could start by finishing unwrapping you.”

“Sounds good; I’m stifling in all this.” Marcus gets free of his jacket et al with less dramatics, thanks to Tomas having already pulled most of the buttons off his shirt (it’s no doubt unreturnable now; he’ll have to sew new buttons back on and keep it). Tomas ‘helps’ him undress his legs and feet, with rather more fondling than necessary. Just like last night, his attention is riveted by the lace garter on his thigh.

“You really like that, don’t you?” Marcus thinks it looks a bit ridiculous, but Tomas’ reaction is anything but.

Tomas kisses his knee and then looks slowly up his body, lingering on his necklace as well. “I like you in pretty things, and I like you in _my_ things,” he says at last, “you should wear more of both.” His voice is deeper than Marcus has ever heard it.

Marcus can understand that, especially the latter; his eyes keep getting drawn back to his bracelet on Tomas' wrist as Tomas wriggles out of his trousers. “I think I’d be willing to wear… more,” he says, “maybe a _lot_ more.” He mostly says it to see Tomas’ eyes go wide and hear him make that wheezing noise again, but then he dares himself to picture wearing the most outré thing he can think of - say, a bright red négligée - and while at first he cringes internally, imagining Tomas’ proportionate response makes makes his ears grow hot.

Tomas groans like Marcus has shared the image with him somehow and clambers on top of him. “I’m going to hold you to that,” he says between kisses, “but right now I want you to fuck me.”

Now it's Marcus' turn to wheeze. _“What?”_

“You heard me.” He nuzzles behind Marcus' ear and whispers, “I loved having you inside me so much, I want to try it another way.” Marcus shudders.

“I was going to say don't get your hopes up for more tonight, but - um.” Apparently he's been pent-up enough, or Tomas is inspiring enough, (or both) for Marcus to rise again.

Tomas hooks an ankle under his thigh and grips his shoulder, and executes a neat little roll that would have flipped their positions without falling out of a twin bed, let alone the fucking king-size _country_ they're currently occupying. He pulls out moves like this sometimes, holds and takedowns, that make Marcus think he must have practiced wrestling or the like at some point. He's never asked, because it always happens in the midst of something else more interesting going on. Case in point: Tomas spread out glowing beneath him, asking with a smile for Marcus to-

“I don't know how,” he confesses, less ashamed than he might once have thought possible. Tomas has seen him all but shake apart over a little devoted attention to his _fingers;_ he's well beyond embarrassment over everything he still hasn't done. And - Tomas has earned his trust.

“I, um-” Tomas is blushing. Marcus is fascinated. “I did some homework.”

_“Really.”_

“My bag, the small pocket on the right.” This pocket turns out to contain a tube of lubricant - a _dented_ tube.

“Studious lad,” Marcus says warmly, and watches Tomas' blush spread from his cheeks to his neck. He jumps back onto the bed and sprawls out on top of his husband, kissing him extravagantly to make up for his teasing.

“You're so, mmph, so much _fun,_ love,” he says against Tomas’ lips, then rolls their foreheads together. “I have the time of my life every day that I'm with you.” It's no less heartfelt for being said playfully; he hopes Tomas knows that.

The way his eyes glitter says he does. “This will be fun too, I promise.” He parts his knees so their erections rub more firmly together - they're both plenty hard again now. “Get a finger wet and put it in me.”

“I should've known you'd be bossy even on the bottom,” Marcus jokes to cover his nerves. He sits back on his knees as he coats his index finger, realizing he's going to want to see what he's doing. Tomas brings his knees up and apart as far as they will go, exposing himself. The vulnerability of it puts a lump in Marcus’ throat.

“Alright, here goes,” he breathes, and reaches for Tomas’ hole. The wrinkled skin is puckered so tightly even Marcus' fingertip looks like too much, but when he touches it he can feel the ring of muscle beneath shift in response. He tries massaging it a little, and Tomas makes an encouraging hum. It spreads the lube around as well, which can only be a good thing. He puts more on his finger and does it again, and then the muscle feels fairly soft to him and Tomas is making pleading noises and tilting his hips up, so he slips his finger inside.

He shivers almost as violently as Tomas. He'd thought Tomas’ mouth felt smooth and tight, but this has it beat, a slick, crushing squeeze. “Oh,” Tomas says quietly, eyes wide, “that feels better than my own finger.”

Marcus takes the image of Tomas touching himself like this, and sets it aside for later, when he can give it the meticulous and thorough examination it deserves. “Bit like how you can't tickle yourself, maybe?” Tomas nods, and bites his lip when Marcus tries moving his finger a little. “Good?”

 _“Yes.”_ Marcus slides his finger deeper, feeling out this new part of Tomas, enchanted by the way it seems to almost suck him in. He nudges up against some lump, a gland or something, and Tomas’ body _ripples._

“What was that?” Tomas gasps.

“How should I know? You're the intrepid researcher.” Marcus is breaking out in a fine sweat.

“You have longer fingers, and a better angle. Do it again- _¡Dios mío!”_ Tomas’ head falls back, and he spasms deliciously around Marcus’ finger. Working on the theory that if one finger against that spot feels good, two might feel even better (and remembering that the ultimate goal is stretching things out a bit), Marcus coats his middle finger and pushes it in too. He stares as the ring of muscle visibly gives way for him. When he reaches that spot again he prods it gently, wiggling his fingers. Tomas’ cock jerks and leaks out clear fluid, and Tomas lets out a loud, shaky moan. His nipples are pulled into such hard points the soft brown skin looks almost black.

“Look at you.” Marcus is beginning to understand how Tomas could enjoy deflowering him by inches. He feels Tomas’ wonder along with him at this brand-new sensation, and a sense of - almost sacred responsibility, to not hurt him, to ensure his pleasure. “I feel like I could do just this forever.” He’s incredibly hard, but it seems unimportant, like he can sit here all night with just his fingers inside him if that’s what Tomas needs.

But it seems that’s _not_ what Tomas needs, because he snaps his eyes open. “Don’t stop. Marcus, _mi esposo, follame por favor.”_

Marcus never imagined he would be here, with Tomas lying before him, naked (aside from the lace garter on his thigh, and Marcus’ bracelet on his wrist, and of course the _wedding ring)_ and begging to be fucked; even more astonishing is the fact that he’s resisting. “I’m not done getting you ready.”

“I’m _ready,_ Marcus, I need you now.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Marcus says desperately.

“You won’t,” Tomas says with that terrifying faith of his. “I want to feel you finish opening me with your cock.”

And even if Marcus _could_ deny Tomas anything (he can’t), he is only a man, after all. He slicks up his erection and lines it up with Tomas’ opening. Once or twice in his life, he’d felt a tiny flicker of the most academic possible smugness at the size of his dick; this is the first time he wishes it were smaller. He wants to ask Tomas again if he’s sure, but - Tomas already told him what he wants. “I love you,” he says helplessly, and starts to push in.

Tomas whimpers at the same moment that Marcus starts to feel resistance. He stops moving, but Tomas sits up and drags him forward so that he has to catch himself on his hands, and the head of his cock pops inside. Tomas cries out, and Marcus freezes, terrified that he’s hurt him, but Tomas clutches at his face and kisses him, chanting, “Yes, yes, finally, _Marcus.”_

Marcus remembers how to breathe. “You’re alright, then?”

 _“Dios,_ it’s so good. More, please. I-” Unbelievably, _now_ he hesitates, then blurts out, “I want every inch of you inside me.”

Marcus’ hips twitch at that, and the pleasure that washes over Tomas’ face in response is undeniable. He tries a tiny thrust on purpose, and Tomas sighs his delight. It’s like the little sigh he made earlier when he first took Marcus into his mouth, like Marcus is setting something right, _giving_ something to him.

He shifts back and eases in again a little deeper, acutely aware of how tightly Tomas’ inner walls had clung to just his fingers, and how much thicker and longer he is than that. _Opening him up._ But he meets no more resistance, just sucking, enveloping heat. Tomas murmurs encouragement, in between panting with his head thrown back and squeezing his cock between their bellies as he tries not to come. It seems only natural to kiss and lick and bite gently at his neck in those moments, scraping his teeth over black stubble. Tomas grows more hair in a day than Marcus does in a week, his whole body teeming with vibrant life.

A small eternity later he bottoms out, hips pressed flush against Tomas’ buttocks. “Tomas,” he whispers, “that’s all of it, Tomas.” His eyes feel huge.

“I can feel you,” Tomas whispers back, equally wide-eyed. “I’ve got you.”

Marcus nods slowly, unable to look away. It’s more than pleasure, this intimacy; he feels like their souls are touching, melting into one. “You have all of me,” he says, and means it, and hopes Tomas understands. “You hold me.”

“I do, Marcus, and you have me. I am with you.” He palms Marcus' cheek and pulls him down for a kiss, lifting his hips at the same time. It feels natural to rock against him, and Tomas hangs onto his biceps and moves in concert with him, so that they meet in the middle to be joined again, and again, and again…

Tomas’ moans build steadily until he’s all but yelling every time Marcus hilts himself, drowning out the grunt of effort Marcus makes at the same moment, throwing dignity to the wind as he gives his all to his love. He’s pouring sweat, and his muscles are starting to shake; he won’t be able to keep this up forever. He must give something more, so he opens his mouth. “Tomas, love, you’re - doing so well. You take - take me so beautifully.”

Tomas makes a plaintive noise and begs, “Touch me, Marcus.” Marcus drops his weight onto one hand and fists Tomas’s cock. In doing so, he has a thought, and he shares it:

“Never thought about it - ngh, before, but you’re - ah! - thicker than me. I-” he licks his lips, but his blood is burning and he can dare anything, anything with Tomas, “I wonder what it might feel like to be split open on you.”

Tomas' eyes bulge.

“Like a piece of ripe fruit.”

Tomas’ mouth falls open and he convulses around Marcus, a shuddering cry building to a scream as his cock jumps and spurts in Marcus’ hand. Marcus fucks him through it until Tomas is limp and trembling, and then he falls to his elbows and ruts to his own climax with his cock buried deep, so deep inside, with his face in Tomas’ neck, with Tomas’ arms and legs and sweet voice _(come, come, that’s it, mi alma)_ wrapped around him, rooted and entwined. When he comes it feels like he pours out his soul, safe into Tomas’ keeping.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *downs a shot* Wedding night, parte deux, aka the scene that just about made my poor little heart explode. *rests head on arms* Enjoy.

“Being an exorcist should come with more time in jacuzzi tubs,” Tomas muses, “we should make a world where that is so.”

“The power of bubbles compels you,” Marcus murmurs. His head is propped on Tomas’ shoulder. He’s bobbing weightlessly in Tomas’ lap, only Tomas’ hands on his belly stopping him from floating away in the current of the jets. Without opening his eyes, he takes two more strawberries from the box on the edge of the tub and feeds one to Tomas and one to himself.

It’s late, far later than would be wise if they had anywhere to be in the morning. But they’d been unbearably sticky and crusty after having sex twice, and once they realized their accommodations included far more than a basic shower, they couldn’t resist. It was Marcus who found the strawberries in the kitchenette. There’s champagne there too, but they’re courting hangovers as it is. Better to stick to water on the inside, and keep the bubbles on the outside.

Besides, while the bubble bath is highly fragrant, the bath oil Tomas found is unscented and almost too thick to pour, probably intended for use less on the bathwater than on its occupants. And that’s something he wants to be sober for - just in case.

He’s been slowly and inefficiently rubbing suds all over Marcus, not so much to get him clean as an excuse to caress and fondle him everywhere. Marcus is beyond relaxed now, drifting in what looks like some state almost parallel to sleep, seemingly impossible to overstimulate after two earthshattering orgasms. The perfect opportunity for Tomas to fit some more love under his skin.

He anchors Marcus in place with his ankles over Marcus' shins, and pours a generous glug of oil into his hands.

“Wha- _oohhh,”_ Marcus barely stirs before Tomas’ fingertips dig into the muscles of his neck. He melts into it, going somehow more boneless than before. Even with Marcus this loose, Tomas still finds knots here and there, especially on one side.

“Feel that?” He kneads one until it gives way, and Marcus grunts acknowledgement. “That’s from sleeping on the couch last night.”

Marcus' voice is deep, amused, unrepentant, as he says, “Bet I’ve got a few in my arse from all the humping we just did,” and eats another strawberry.

Tomas works his way down and doesn’t stop at the small of Marcus’ back. He digs right into Marcus’ glutes; they’re modestly-sized but firm, the thin, soft skin over them the only clue to Marcus’ age. “No knots here,” he says in Marcus’ ear, “or should I check inside?”

“You’re joking,” Marcus drawls, lazily incredulous, not even trying to turn his head to look at him. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is fifty-four years old.”

“It doesn’t have to go anywhere,” Tomas argues, “I just want you to know how good it feels.”

Marcus makes a ‘hrmmm’ kind of noise, eloquently dubious and somehow very British, but stretches his neck to settle more firmly against Tomas’ shoulder and lets his legs fall open.

 _God, God, help me to be worthy of such trust._ Tomas oils his fingers and slips them into Marcus’ cleft. He coats all the surrounding skin for good measure, but Marcus is still completely relaxed and doesn’t need any rubbing at all to let two fingers in at once.

Marcus squirms a little and grunts softly as Tomas explores his ass, searching for the spot that lit Tomas up like a Christmas tree when Marcus touched it in him. He knows he's found it when Marcus says, “Oh!” in a very different tone of voice, high-pitched and breathy. Tomas grins.

“Isn't it wonderful?” He massages the area, a palpable mass that he vaguely recalls might be the prostate, and glories in Marcus’ undulations and quiet moans. At some point he turns his head, seeking, needy; Tomas kisses him and tastes strawberries.

“Oh, oh, you keep this up you're going to make me come again.”

“Wait, really?” He checks; Marcus is still completely soft. “How?”

“Inside, I guess. S'how it's gone in my sleep for years now - waking up coming, but not hard nor wet.” There's no shame to the dreamy admission; Marcus is on some plane where shame can't reach him. Tomas is amazed, and humbled, and - very, _very_ aroused.

“Marcus. Would you like it if I fucked you like this?” He remembers Marcus’ words - _split me open like a piece of ripe fruit_ \- and bites his lip.

After a long moment, Marcus nods. “Yes. Just - gently.”

“Always, _mi cielito.”_ Marcus takes a third finger easily, but Tomas imagines stuffing his hardon into the tender little opening and stretches Marcus around a fourth finger, just to be safe. He'd wanted the burn, a little edge of an ache, when Marcus fucked him for the first time, but Marcus’ cock is as long and slim as he is. Tomas’ cock, while slightly shorter, is positively fat by comparison, and Tomas promised him gentleness.

At last Marcus is as soft and pliable as he's going to get short of taking an entire hand. Tomas uses up nearly half the remaining oil on his cock and pulls Marcus down in the water, down to part his cheeks over Tomas’ hardness. Marcus rolls his head on Tomas’ shoulder and a soft cry breaks from him as Tomas nudges inside.

The bubbles are dissolving, and even through the rippling water Tomas can see the way Marcus’ ass is forced wide around him. He brings one of Marcus’ hands down to feel himself, his hole stretched tight by Tomas’ girth. “Feel that?”

“Yeah. You worked hard to get here.” Marcus sounds raw, like his inner defences are down with his outer ones and Tomas is reaching some exposed part of his core.

“I love that work. I love _you.”_ Tomas pulls him slowly up and down with a hand on his hip, gliding just far enough each time for Marcus to feel the push. “You are beyond precious to me, deserving of all my love and every good thing.”

Marcus makes another one of those soft little cries and shivers in Tomas’ hold. He can feel Marcus spasm inside, tightening and releasing.

“Is that it?” he asks. Marcus nods weakly. Tomas feels a groundswell of awe. He'd thought only women could orgasm like that; clearly he was wrong. His awe is joined by excitement as he considers the possibility that -

“Are you sore? Do you need to stop?”

“I'm not- not _sore,_ but why would- oh _God,”_ Marcus moans as Tomas keeps thrusting, no harder but slightly faster, enough for it to feel like a rhythm. With his free hand he strokes Marcus’ belly, then his chest. If he splays his fingers wide he can rub both nipples at once. He can feel Marcus’ heart beating, so hard it would disturb the water if the water was still.

“Marcus Ortega,” he murmurs, and Marcus sobs as he comes again, his face red and wet. Tomas kisses the corner of his eye, then his mouth. “I wish I could fill you up with my love, until you felt it in your fingertips.” Clumsily Marcus lifts a hand and pets at Tomas’ mouth; he gets the hint and lips at Marcus’ clever, sensitive fingers, licking and then engulfing two of them. He sucks hard on his fingers and rubs his nipples in circles, and Marcus starts to just shake continuously, gasping every time Tomas thrusts in like he’s pushing the sounds out of him, like Tomas can keep him up in the clouds forever.

And he would if he could, but he’s not unaffected by Marcus’ absolute openness and responsiveness, how he’s given himself over so completely. It’s like Marcus is praising him with his entire body at once, and Tomas has a verified weakness for Marcus' praise. He moans around the fingers in his mouth. Maybe Marcus guesses what he means, or maybe he feels Tomas tense up behind him or swell a little more inside him; regardless, he manages to plant his toes against the opposite wall of the tub and grind back against Tomas. That’s it; Tomas goes over, hanging onto Marcus for dear life as he comes so hard his vision whites out.

He feels boneless himself after, collapsing against the rim of the tub, lightheaded and gasping for air, passively hugging Marcus to him.

Incredibly, Marcus recovers first - in a manner of speaking. “Bloody _hell,”_ he groans, voice wrecked, “I can’t feel my _face.”_

Tomas brings up Marcus’ hand again and kisses the palm; when he lets go it splashes back into the water like it doesn’t belong to Marcus anymore. Feebly, Marcus rolls his head in Tomas’ direction.

“You’re fetching food tomorrow. Later today. Whenever. On account of I’m never moving again.” Tomas reaches out with his foot and pulls the plug for an answer, and of course they do move again, wet skin chilling rapidly in the night air as they rub each other dry with the biggest, fluffiest towels Tomas has ever seen.

When at last they bundle into the bed, almost too clean and definitely too tired, Marcus faces Tomas and wraps around him in a way he has previously only ever done in sleep, laying his head on his chest and throwing one leg over his hip.

“I think I needed fifty-four years of life to be ready to love you,” Marcus says quietly. Tomas falls asleep stroking his hair.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More newlywed wallowing.

The bed & breakfast proprietors are willing to extend the definition of ‘breakfast’ to 1 PM, for which Tomas thanks them profusely, and gets indulgent smiles along with his overflowing basket of food. When he gets back to the cottage, Marcus hasn’t budged from where Tomas left him sprawled in the bed. His back looks very pink against the bright white of the sheets; the sunbeam making its slow sweep over the bed may have something to do with that. His _husband;_ Tomas can barely look away long enough to unpack the food and pour the coffee. He brings a cup into the bedroom and sits in a chair beside the bed, to enjoy the rare sight of Marcus waking up after him. When they keep human hours, Marcus typically wakes up with the sun; to sleep late he has to be truly exhausted.

The smells of breakfast produce signs of life from the bed within a few minutes: first a snuffling, then a slow full-body stretch, then Marcus scratching the back of his head before finally lifting and turning his head to face Tomas without moving the rest of his body. Tomas despairs for his spine. _I’ll just have to give him another backrub later,_ he thinks, and refuses to quail at the precedent set by the last one.

“Izzat coffee?” Marcus makes grabby hands; Tomas steadies the cup for him as he takes a sip. Marcus closes his eyes and smiles. “You put honey in it.”

“I know it’s not 18 sugars and enough cream to turn it white, but this is actually decent coffee and it deserves to be tasted.”

“No argument here. I’ve been to Ethiopia; I know from good coffee.” Tomas can see him there: eating with his hands, charming a family by stumbling through snippets of their language (and then by _not_ stumbling - Marcus absorbs languages like a sponge)... and then shutting himself in some terrible room to continue the only work he’d been shaped for. Always alone. Always face-to-face with ageless, inhuman hatred, and calling out to the tortured soul it squatted in.

_Not alone any longer. Never alone again._

“D’you have a lot of feelings about Ethiopia or something?”

Tomas shakes himself. It’s too early in the day to share such heavy thoughts, so he covers with, “Do you miss seeing the world?”

“Wasn’t seeing much of it, was I? Get in, do the job, get out again. This is the first country I’ve really lived in since England.” Marcus has somehow managed to down the entire cup of coffee without Tomas getting it back for so much as one more sip, and is visibly revving up before Tomas’ eyes. He winks at Tomas in that way he has that involves his entire face; it’s ridiculously charming. “I much prefer the memories I’ve made over here.”

“Well, come make a memory out of breakfast. There’s pancakes with maple syrup, and bacon and eggs, and fruit salad that didn’t come out of a can.”

A fat smile spreads slowly across Marcus’ face. “Bit of a problem there: I can’t seem to roll off my stomach. Almost like someone shagged me in half last night.”

Tomas’ stomach clenches. “You’re hurting? You should have said somethi-” Marcus cuts him off, laughing and lifting his hand.

“It’s nothing, just a few sore muscles. I've had worse pulling landscaping duty at an abbey.”

“Oh.” Tomas sags with relief.

“All I was getting at is you should feed me right here. Yourself too.”

Tomas brightens. “I can do that.”

He fetches some of everything and a big cloth napkin to put the plate on, and sets it up on the edge of the mattress. Marcus props himself up on his elbows and tugs it into the middle of the bed. “Get those clothes off and hop in here.”

It’s an unimaginable decadence, to strip naked and go back to bed in the middle of the day. To lie side-by-side with Marcus and feed him bits of fruit and syrupy pancake and bacon, and be fed in turn. To ‘clean up’ by setting the plate on the floor and then licking Marcus’ fingers clean, watching his eyes grow hooded as Tomas seeks out every last crumb and trace of syrup.

“That was good,” Marcus tells him, “but now I have a hankering for… sausage.” Tomas gapes and dissolves into spluttering laughter; Marcus takes advantage and flips him onto his back, then clambers on top of him and kisses him soundly. The way Marcus laughs into the kiss and wriggles with the goodness of it is intoxicating.

“Mm, ha, you're not moving like someone who's hurting now,” Tomas observes to the ceiling as Marcus drags his moustache down his neck in a line of sucking kisses.

“Pancakes have restored me,” Marcus declares, “also you'll notice I'm not doing any sitting.” He reaches Tomas’ nipples. “Do you know, I've no idea if you're sensitive here or not?” He sets to rubbing and licking them, gently like Tomas does to him.

“Less than you, I think. When I- when I play with them I pinch them- mm! Yes, like that,” Tomas pants. Marcus scrapes one with his upper teeth and lower lip, and Tomas’ toes curl. Marcus must notice how hard he's getting, because he lowers himself until Tomas' cock is rubbing his belly. Tomas arches up gratefully against soft skin and firm muscle, counterpoint to the tantalizing pleasure-pain Marcus is growing bolder with up above.

When the rolling of his hips becomes jerky and needy, Marcus tells his chest, “So nice to make your acquaintance, but I'm needed down south.” Tomas claps a hand over his eyes and groans. Marcus continues on his way, nuzzling his ribs, licking his abdominal muscles, and nipping at the jut of his hipbone. At last he takes Tomas’ cock in a gentle grip and sniffs and licks him experimentally, sliding his foreskin around.

“You've got less play here when you're hard than I do,” he says, his voice low and warm and intrigued. “Like you're bursting at the seams.” Tomas stares as Marcus opens his mouth wide to take him in, rubbing him with his tongue as he bobs his head and suckles. Ever tactile, he doesn’t relinquish his hold around the base, and in fact brings his other hand in on the action, stroking his balls and inner thighs. He tilts his head to look searchingly up at Tomas the entire time.

It's so very _Marcus,_ and Tomas is falling apart within minutes, cradled in his bold, innocent curiosity. “Marcus, Marcus,” he chants, kneading at his shoulders, “I'm so close, _cariño.”_ Marcus hums encouragingly and swallows hard around him, and Tomas takes a huge gulp of air and sighs it out again as he comes easily, joyfully, with the afternoon sun bright in his eyes and Marcus warm between his legs.

Marcus sits up, smacking his lips and surveying Tomas smugly. Tomas pulls him down to taste himself in his mouth.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for the dorkiest of all the author's many TE headcanons.

“Were you ever a wrestler?” Marcus remembers to ask - finally, after nearly two years of idle wondering - surprising a laugh out of Tomas that jiggles Marcus where he lies against his chest.  

“What makes you ask that?”

“I never had to teach you any holds. In fact, I picked up a few from you.” He remembers the night he pulled Casey Rance from the lake, the moment in the convent when she twisted out of his hands gone numb with cold, and his jolt of terror because not one of the nuns around them could take _Casey,_ big strong lacrosse star that she was; the demon would tear them apart. And then, like a miracle, Tomas caught her and held her fast, and the situation inched back from the brink of disaster.

 _Backup._ It was such a foreign concept back then. Marcus never wants to work without it again.

Tomas looks around (as if the noise of their flagrant lovemaking hasn't surely driven off every living thing for miles) and confides, “I was a _secret_ wrestler.”

_“What?”_

“By the time I was ten I had my career options narrowed down to two choices: priest, or _luchador.”_

Marcus is smiling with his mouth wide open. _“No._ Those masked gymnasts on posters all over Mexico City? _You?”_

Tomas shrugs, looking sheepish. “I had a lot of energy as a kid.”

Marcus considers Tomas’ energy level now in his thirties, extrapolates that to a boy, and twitches with mild horror.

“And eventually the money added up, even just minor league. I paid for seminary with it.”

“What was your alias?” Tomas mutters something. “Didn't quite catch that, love.”

_“El Rockero Sangriento.”_

Marcus shakes him gleefully. “Oh my God, I want to know everything.”

It takes some more cajoling, but he draws the story out of Tomas eventually: how play-fighting with his friends turned into semi-serious roleplay as they grew, complete with costumes; how they were approached by recruiters for the flyweight division; how if Tomas didn't do _something_ to run himself ragged in his teens his body would lie awake in twitching misery half the night, and _lucha libre_ was more fun than the two-hour jogs his abuela thought he was going on.

“She didn't know?”

“She would _never_ have approved. Even when I left for school, I told her my scholarships were bigger than they were.” Tomas frowns suddenly. “I hope she believed me. I don't want to know what she thought I was doing if she didn't.”

“Did anyone know?”

“No. No one.” A tired shadow passes over Tomas’ face. “I used to spend so much time lying, Marcus. Everywhere I went, I lied to someone about something. _I_ didn't know who I was half the time.”

“And now?”

His smile is beautiful. “Now, the last lie I told was weeks ago, and it was just to let a store clerk think a vision was a seizure. I know myself, and I am known.” He kisses Marcus, leisurely but growing in heat: his arms tightening, the stroking of his tongue becoming more lewd. There’s an audible wet noise when Marcus backs off to speak.

“Do you feel like being known some more?” Marcus pitches his voice deep, much more suggestive than he would usually dare. It’s a thrilling discovery, one he keeps making over and over again: to learn that flirting doesn’t have to be just a game - it can _keep going,_ deliver in truth the things promised in jest.

Tomas thinks. “Are you recovered enough to lie on your back? I would like to ride you.”

Marcus grunts at the lust that surges through him at that, and manages what he thinks might be a respectable wrestler’s move himself as he rolls them until Tomas is sitting in his lap. If his arse does in fact mildly protest this treatment, well, its objection is overruled.

He remembers another thought he had previously tabled. “You said you did research.”

Somehow, Tomas is still capable of blushing. It’s enchanting. “I did. I wanted to make sure I knew what to do.”

Marcus’ face is hot too. “Would you show me?”

Which is how he winds up reclining with his gorgeous young husband sitting astride, fingering himself open with many a rippling muscle and breathless little noise. _Displaying_ himself.Sometimes, God is both great _and_ good.

“Christ, Tomas,” Marcus breathes, stroking his damp flanks, his chest, his arms, his fat, drooling dick. “When was this happening?”

“In- oh! In the shower, mostly,” Tomas pants. “We hadn’t even been naked together yet. I didn’t want to scare you off.”

“Let me state categorically that I would _not_ have been scared off.” Fainted dead away at the sudden rush of blood to his groin might have been a very real possibility, however.

Tomas’ arm works, and he scowls in frustration. “I can’t get as deep as you.”

Marcus’ fingers twitch where they’re currently resting on Tomas’ hip. “Want some help?”

Tomas shakes his head. “I want your cock.”

“Well,” Marcus says faintly, “it’s at your service.” Tomas slicks him up and lowers himself inch by slow, tight inch, moaning loudly all the way.

“You like taking me before you're completely ready,” Marcus realizes. He would worry about this if he didn't have the evidence of how _much_ Tomas likes it right in front of him.

Tomas nods tightly, beads of sweat standing out on his face. “It feels so good, Marcus.”

“Sweet boy, so gentle with me,” he thinks aloud, putting the pieces together as he traces a path up to Tomas’ nipples, “but you need just a titch less gentle handling yourself, don't you?” He pinches them, not _very_ hard - just the amount of pressure that made Tomas’ cock twitch earlier. It works this time too.

Tomas throws his head back and seats himself completely in one last push. “Ah! Marcus!”

“Oh, fuck,” Marcus groans. He'd been preoccupied with his new discovery, his attention diverted from how Tomas feels to _him,_ but now he’s balls-deep again and forcibly reminded.

And then Tomas starts to move.

He wasn't kidding when he said he wanted to ride Marcus. He rises so fast and falls so hard he's basically _bouncing,_ dropping himself onto the full length of Marcus’ shaft and then popping up again in an unconscious show of strength. Every few strokes he tosses his head as he grinds down like if he just tries hard enough he can get Marcus even deeper. The air rings with his ecstatic noises.

Marcus is already seeing starbursts, the tension in his abdomen drawing tight. “Oh, love, this is going to be quick if you're going to be as gorgeous as that.” He fists Tomas’ cock with one hand and pinches his nipple with the other; he would sit up to bite him but Tomas is moving too fast. He tries his best to lift his hips when Tomas comes down, to help him fuck himself that little bit harder.

The pitch of Tomas’ voice changes. “Go on, Tomas, come for me,” Marcus urges, “come _on_ me, mess me up.” Tomas stills and then shudders violently, striping Marcus’ chest with a hoarse cry.

He topples after, folding onto Marcus loose-limbed and dewy, and kisses him with soft-mouthed passion, the tender eye of the storm that blew into Marcus’ life two years ago and changed it forever. Marcus holds him and arches up into him as his arousal releases in a rush.

When he has breath to spare again, Marcus says, “So, were there tiny spandex shorts involved? And can you be bribed to wear some again?”

_“Ugh.”_


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *holds the tattered remnants of Marcus' V-card up to the light and squints* I think I see a bit of paper left over there. Hand me the hole-puncher.

Tomas falls asleep in the early evening, and wakes up after dark to the sound of Marcus singing along to his tape deck. He shuffles out of the bedroom and leans against the doorframe, just watching Marcus bounce on his toes around the tiny kitchen, poking a spatula at something in a frying pan. When he turns the burner down Tomas advances and hugs him from behind, taking a deep sniff of his shoulder.

“You showered,” he complains mildly, _“and_ you dressed.” Just in his undershirt and briefs, but still.

Marcus raises an eyebrow. “I won’t cook dirty, that’s just disgusting. And anyone who cooks naked deserves whatever burns they get.”

“Fair enough.” He gropes Marcus slowly, just spanning his fingers over his belly and ribs. “What are you making?”

“Omelette,” Marcus says, a bit unsteadily, “such as it is.”

“I didn’t know we had ingredients for an omelette.” He cups Marcus’ buttocks through his briefs.

“I think the cheese and cold cuts were supposed to be finger food- do you want me to stop?”  

Marcus lives on the brink of too thin as it is. “No. Do you want _me_ to stop?”

“...No,” Marcus admits, and goes back to monitoring his omelette - or trying to with Tomas feeling him up. Tomas molds himself to Marcus’ backside, letting him feel how hard he is. He spreads a hand over Marcus’ crotch, and thumbs his nipples through the thin cloth of his undershirt. They're already hard little points, and Marcus trembles at the touch.

“So sensitive,” Tomas rumbles, and rolls his hips to tell Marcus how much he likes that. He doesn’t say _so needy, so much time to make up for,_ but he thinks it. Marcus should have had people to touch him and care for him all along, and Tomas can’t make that right at this late date but he can damn well try - and enjoy himself thoroughly in the trying.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Marcus says thinly, “to feel _more_ there with the singlet  _on,_ and yet.”

Tomas is delighted, and scratches Marcus’ nipples with the barest edges of his fingernails, then cups him soothingly with flat hands when he squirms. “I wonder what it would feel like if you wore something else. Something silky, maybe. Would you let me find out?” Marcus whines and makes the tiniest of nods. Tomas goes back to groping him everywhere he can reach at once, intoxicated by how Marcus, so big and rangy - bigger than Tomas, who is himself a big man - just melts into him.

With all the clarity of a vision, he can picture them doing this in the future, standing in another place. A silk camisole - black, no, white, with lace edging - shimmers with the movement of Marcus' body and Tomas’ hands. If Marcus is wearing panties under it, genitals all wrapped up in lace as soft as their wedding garters, well, it's Tomas’ fantasy. His _plan,_ one he dares to hope he might make a reality someday. After all, he already got Marcus to marry him, right? Anything is possible.

“You know, we're already wed,” Marcus says quietly. “You don't have to- to _woo_ me anymore.”

“Wrong,” Tomas sings, _“so_ wrong. I _get_ to _keep_ wooing you, every day.” He slides his hands under the waistband of Marcus’ briefs, feeling his humid crack and the heft of his cock. He's run the poor man so ragged he's still only half-hard. “I badly want to use my mouth on you.”

The spatula clatters on the countertop, and for a second Tomas thinks he's gone too far, but Marcus is only turning the element off. “There, now we won't burn the house down. Go on, then,” he rasps.

Tomas leans up on his tiptoes and kisses Marcus’ jaw, then his mouth when he turns his head, before dropping to his knees as easily as he ever did in church. He tugs Marcus’ briefs down and wonders if he'll always feel this almost holy sense of privilege, to be blessed with Marcus’ trust and vulnerability.

He was going to spin Marcus around and suck him, but a thought occurs to him as he looks at the curve of Marcus’ ass. “Are you still sore?” he wonders. Marcus, hands braced on the counter, shakes his head. “Maybe I should check.” Marcus spits what sounds like profanity in some language Tomas doesn't know, but he doesn't resist when Tomas parts his cheeks.

“Everything _looks_ good,” he says, peering closely. “Oh, and you smell so nice and fresh from that shower.” He's still a bit damp, actually, and smells mostly of soap. He nuzzles at the top of his crack trying to get a whiff of his natural scent, and then on impulse licks him instead.

Marcus makes a strangled noise that isn't a word in any language, and - spreads his legs. Delighted, Tomas licks him again, wetter, and with more of the surface of his tongue. If he really works at it he can make out the taste of his skin. He goes lower, catching the furled skin of his hole, and Marcus shouts.

“Fuck! Tomas!”

Tomas must look like a maniac, grinning with his tongue fully-extended, but since his face is currently planted in Marcus’ ass he thinks they're well beyond caring about appearances. He laps and scrubs at the whole tender crease, until the smell of soap is replaced by the smell of Marcus’ clean sweat, and his ears are ringing with Marcus’ shattered moans.

“Touch me, Tomas,” Marcus pleads, and Tomas spins him by the hips and takes his cock (still not rigid enough for, say, fucking, but ruddy and dripping like Marcus is in dire need all the same) into his mouth. The slight give of his flesh right now emboldens Tomas, and he pushes his face farther down Marcus’ shaft, farther than he dared before, swallowing when it nudges the back of his throat, and finds that he doesn't gag. Marcus clutches the countertop for balance, his legs starting to shake.

Tomas’ fingers drift into Marcus’ crease, feeling how the whole area is slick with his saliva, and he tries swallowing around the head of his cock again at the same time as he pushes a finger into his hole. He slides deep, seeking the sweet spot, and when he finds it Marcus spasms around his finger and spurts into his throat with a disbelieving groan.

The omelette hasn't even gone cold yet. After they finish it, Marcus flips over the tape and Tomas helps him with the dishes, and then Marcus pulls him into his arms for a dance.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And on the third day they boned slightly less onscreen and interacted with the rest of humanity somewhat.

They wake late the next morning and make love again, grinding against each other slow and sleepy, breath mingling as they kiss open-mouthed. Tomas feels sated and then some, like his body is beginning to trust that Marcus will still be there later so he doesn’t _have_ to have him every way he can _now now now._ He makes the mistake of trying to tell Marcus this.

“Two days and the romance is dead,” Marcus wails in falsetto, throwing himself down with the back of his hand held dramatically against his forehead.

Luckily Tomas knows how to up the ante. “Well, if that’s your only standard of romance,” he says, reaching for the lube and flexing his fingers. Marcus cracks and holds up his hands in surrender.

“I give, I give! Cease your fuck-rampage,” he chortles.

 _“My_ fuck-rampage?!” Tomas pins him and blows a raspberry in his navel just to hear him squawk.

They’re running very low on provisions in the cottage, so they eat breakfast up at the main building, and afterwards Tomas goes for a jog into town and walks back with a few groceries. Marcus really enjoys cooking; Tomas should try to arrange for them to stay places where he can do it more often. It wouldn’t kill Tomas to learn to make more than bachelor chow himself, either; he’s a married man now. He repeats this thought to himself several times, swinging his grocery bag and grinning like a loon.

When he gets back, Marcus is sitting out on the porch, scowling at his phone. “Ah, there you are! Would you help me bludgeon this blasted thing into accepting a conference call?”

Verity’s voice sighs over speaker as Tomas fiddles with the phone. “You guys need to upgrade from those little drug-dealer burners.”

“Yeah, that’s just what I need: more features to bash my head against.”

“You could check your email without going to a library, and have books to read without taking up space,” Verity wheedles. Marcus crosses his arms stonily, but Tomas files the idea away. Summer is turning into fall; Christmas isn’t that far off.  

“Try it now, Verity.”

“Okay, looks good on my end. Here goes.” A click, and then she says, “Marcus and Tomas Ortega - mazel tov, by the way - I’d like you to meet Lindy Ghostkeeper.”

“Hello,” says a new voice.

“Lindy," Verity says with audible relish, "once exorcised a pond.”

 _“Why?”_ Marcus blurts out. “It’s a _pond._ Why risk your life and soul for it?”

“It was a pond on my band’s reserve,” says Lindy. “My people have lost enough land; I wasn’t about to let some asswipe bad spirit take even more.” She has a slight accent, composed of very even stresses and timing.

Marcus, whose lifelong worldly possessions fit in a backpack and small duffle, is visibly taken aback. “Hmph,” he says, “that’s the first decent reason I’ve ever heard. You’ve no idea the number of people getting their knickers in a twist over a damn house.”

“Houses are expensive,” Lindy points out mildly.

“People are _priceless.”_

Lindy’s laugh is soft and startled, the sound of someone meeting Marcus and finding he’s not what they expected. Tomas grins.

“So how'd you know it was possessed? A body of water can’t exactly speak in tongues.”

“Well, there was…” Lindy starts describing the incident. Marcus listens intently, asking probing questions here and there.

Tomas has a very odd moment: less than a vision, but more than a fantasy. Maybe it’s a premonition. He sees Marcus becoming a focal point in Verity’s network, making connections with more and more people, through writing and phone calls, and increasingly often in person, to the point that some begin to travel with them. He sees these newcomers learning exorcism, and bringing new variations to it, and teaching others, a web of hope growing and growing, people stepping up into doorways to push back the night. He sees the turning of the tide.

Bennett has told Tomas, in confidence, that as far as he knows (which is _far)_ Marcus is the oldest full-time exorcist living on the face of the earth. There are older parish priests here and there who’ve faced down a demon or two in their time; Bennett estimates Marcus has driven out over a thousand.

If you ask Tomas (which no one _has)_ it’s 1. criminal that he’s the first person Marcus has ever taught; and 2. past time to have a path laid out to where exorcism isn’t all Marcus does anymore. Maybe this is that path, a way his work can change so he doesn’t die doing it. He prays, silently and fervently, for it to be so.

He’s not imagining the voice of God then, as still and small as it was big and loud before: _that’s right. take care of My boy, and let him take care of you._

“Tomas is woolgathering, but he says goodbye too,” Marcus is saying, giving Tomas an arch look.

Tomas shakes himself and says, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Lindy. Goodbye, Verity, and _be careful.”_

“No shit,” Verity snorts, then, more gently, “I am. You too.” She ends the call.

Marcus peers at Tomas. “Anything to be concerned about?” He looks preemptively concerned.

Tomas holds his eyes and shakes his head. “No. Something beautiful, for once.” He plucks at his sweat-soaked shirt. “But right now I need a shower.” He heads for the house, stripping as he goes, and turns in the doorway. “Will you join me?”

Marcus blinks slowly and smiles, then gets up. “Yeah. Yeah, on my way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. And that’s it! Holy shit, what a ride! Frankly, I chose my summary in all seriousness; I lost control of this story at square one and I’ve just been seeing where it goes ever since. 
>   2. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has hung on through several abrupt tone changes to see this thing through to the end. Your comments mean the world to me, and provided the vital energy necessary to give these soft boys the honeymoon they deserve!
>   3. An especially large thank you to all my friends from [the TE Discord ](https://discord.gg/twkzTdU)for helping me develop this story and cheerleading its publication chapter by chapter. It's an open Discord and a bright little corner of the TE fandom; join ussss. 
> 



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